People and hooks: a study of reading and book-buying habit

Reviews the book, People and hooks: a study of reading and book-buying habits by Henry C. Link and Harry Arthur Hopf (1946). The Psychological Corporation and the Hopf Institute of Management were commissioned to conduct a consumers' survey upon which estimates of future market trends could be based. People and books is a report of the findings of this study, made in the spring of 1945, by the men who served as joint directors. Conventional public opinion polling techniques were used in gathering data. The main body of the report consists of a series of simple tables and graphs, showing percentages of people in the consumers group who answered the questions asked according to each of various alternatives, with accompanying text describing and interpreting these statistics. The major conclusion is that "everything in our survey points to a long-term gain in the reading, and therefore in the purchasing, of books." The validity of this inference might be questioned. Although some adjustment was made in the sampling quotas, no data were gathered on the reading of the millions of American men who were in military service at the time the survey was made. Nor is there any reference in the interpretation of the findings to relevant information that has been gathered by other investigators about this large and influential group of readers. No effort has been made to relate the findings of this survey to some of the other studies of "people and books" that have been made by highly competent investigators.