The data comes to us from census.gov. The numbers are annual spend per household.
While our spend on personal care products marginally increased our spend on reading (which was only 25% of personal care spending decreased 25% to 18% of personal care spending.
Do you think we spend less on reading because content is free and/or Amazon effect or did we stop caring about reading?
Isn’t reading a type of personal care that is worth spending more?
Iterative Path 
I think we (US population as a whole) just care less about reading, on average. Free information is abundant and overflows our intake pipes, so there is little hunger for more printed word.
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That is a possibility or better libraries.
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Is any of this due to an increasing percentage shifting over to digital books? It easily saves me $3-5 per book I buy digitally versus the paper equivalent.
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