"When you think of it, the time compression between reading and writing is quite astonishing: the thriller that lasts for half a plane journey will have taken half a year to write. By contrast, audio and video are not lossy compression. They are lossy expansion. They take more time to convey less meaning."

Andrew Brown in the Grauniad:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/27/guardianweeklytechnologysection.comment

Books are like radio, the visualization is so much more exciting

(following another hasty edit)

You would.

There's a quiz for you over in the Coffee Bar, btw.

Interesting article, Adastra

How far do you think the unstoppable rise of the internet provides a corollary to that trend?  Against the "decline of reading", anyone - not only those with access to a fine academic-level library in their own language - can find prose, poetry, philosophy, scientific research, political tracts, religious works, plays, musicology, literature of distant countries and epochs..  with just a few minutes Googling.  I don't only mean "finding quick answers to informational questions" as in consulting Wikipedia etc..  at least seven of the books I read last year never saw a sheet of paper, and were read off-screen.  I can't say I necessarily "enjoy" reading books on a pocket "tablet" computer, but I was on a longish journey (1.5 months through Central Asia, then a month in Mongolia) and dragging a whole library of printed books with me wasn't possible or practicable.  Although a paper book is perhaps more "cosy", searching through one for a particular name, word or phrase is infinitely slower than with a digitised text

Another aspect might also be physical access to books.  I live in a location where books and libraries are all around me, BUT books in my own native language are almost impossible to obtain easily (especially new books or titles on specialised topics).  Although I plough through books in Russian at a speed  which isn't frustrating to me as a reader (depending on the topic, style and vocabulary) there would be no point at all in my trying to read Faulkner or Synge or Smollett in a Russian translation, if English is my native language.  These texts can be downloaded from the internet in a few moments, however.

I wonder whether stats on "book-reading" stem from those in the book business, who make assumptions about consumption of a measurable "product" which are not necessarily accurate?

The Amazon patented Swindle, you mean, Incy?    The idea and technology are good, but the devil's in the detail - it's fraught with the same "exclusive file-format/no-copy/no-share/no-lend" software locking as some music-file download formats. 

Until the day comes when Literature Police cart me away for "illicitly" reading Natalya Mikhailovna's copy of Bunin, I won't be buying a device which doesn't enable/entitle me to lend/borrow titles

.rtf is a an excellent open-access format, and opens on any device!  I simply set the default font to 12-pt or higher, and eyestrain is no longer an issue

In the Russian classic by Ilf & Petrov, "The Twelve Chairs", the scurrilous anti-heroes are on their uppers whilst in a spa-town in the Caucasus mountains...  so they start charging spa visitors money "for a view of the drop from the top of the cliff" that they could previously have seen for nothing.  The "Swindle" follows in that noble literary furrow, I think? 

I think that there is a massive opportunity for drama (and readings of novels too) to be pod-casted (not just BBC material) and sold onto the internet - after all, the ipod is the new Walkman, and a lot of busy folk, like me, do not get time for TV drama. The BBC has a huge back-catalogue that they could sell, like they do with some older dramas on CD (e.g. Paul Temple, Agatha Christie thrillers). PSB stations in the States also produce some great stuff.

In any case, as others have said, radio drama is far more visual than TV drama or film.
It really gets into your psyche!