Why Indians don’t read

Why can’t you do any direct mail or, for that matter, long copy ads in India? Simple. Indians don’t read.

But opening your eyes shows you that there are more papers, magazines and books than ever before, and more bookshops. And there is the www. While much of what is written in the world, for work or pleasure, is never read, surely enough is read to sustain the writing, financially and physiologically (Almost all sperms don’t make it, but enough do to make 9 billion of us).

So what’s going on?

While I haven’t got any surveys to refer to except this one, I suppose a simple and possible answer may be obtained if we look at a family’s reading. The calculations are here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pjtNNMP33DgsJnLoV4Sy1Pw&hl=en_GB. (The logic is not different from the explanation to the GMAT paradox.)

As is apparent, each member’s reading goes up, yet the average, dependent on the number of members, keeps fluctuating – and in two cases, goes down.

It can easily be that, in the larger market, readership is going up, as is each individual’s reading; yet the average reading is going down because neo-literates form larger and larger fractions of the population (while the bibliophiles’ fraction, and their power to influence the average, keeps getting smaller [though their numbers increase]).

In short, simply asking where an average came from could have led to a very different explanation, and decision!