"American Idol for literature"

USA Today has a short article on WEbook, a kind of clearinghouse for book ideas and new writing. One nugget nested in that article caught my eye: the percentage of Americans who read a novel, poem, play or story in the past year jumped from 46.7% in 2002 to 50.2% in 2008. Still pretty pathetic if you ask me, yet it does represent a 3.5% increase -- or around 10 million more people reading literature.