Why do people read?

Ask a number of book readers why they read and you will inevitably get a variety of answers. So recently we did just that. We surveyed over a hundred book readers to find out what made them pick up a book and read.

As author Paul Auster stated, “When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”

So it seems to be the case. Based on our survey results, the number one choice for reading is to escape to other worlds.

Luckily for readers today, there is no shortage of books to read or ways to get a story—in print, as a digital book and even a multi-cast audiobook—and so make their escape into some exotic land with adventure at the turn of a page.

A good book can take the reader to a different world or a different time. “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time,” as Carl Sagan once said.

We read authors who will take us on that voyage and away from the daily grind. As author L. Ron Hubbard stated, “In writing an adventure story a writer has to know that he is adventuring for a lot of people who cannot. A writer has to take them here and there about the globe and show them excitement and love and realism. As long as that writer is living the part of an adventurer when he is hammering the keys, he is succeeding with this story.”

And so we read to escape and explore new worlds.

Readers have also told us they read to be inspired, for pleasure, to learn and for many other benefits as shown in the following video.