Books? -- TV -- Video Games - Tik Tok (unsocial nettwerk)?

I want to know was there ever a really big book reading audience?  How big was it? How big was the population (in the US) which read books regularly.  

In my life the local library always played a big role.  In both communities I lived in during the school year and in the summer regular trips to the library were a part of life, a fun place to go.  You could legally browse books. In fact that was the point

My children and I have kept up the tradition, our whole lives, ..... until my older

daughter reached puberty.  blah.  What happened?   Well? Maybe it is a natural progression???   

A hundred years ago Ernest Hemingway was a rock star.  Seriously.  His support acts were F Scott Fitzgerald and that Paris crowd.   They were really the sh... about town and the US.  

But by the 50s when Hemingway stopped publishing the golden age of Television had started.   Did TV really eclipse books?  Did everyone suddenly move over from books to watch television?  Or did the people who watched TV ever read books? Or did the people who read books stop reading books but also watched TV? Wasnt there, couldnt there have been space for both?   

Suddenly it started when I was growing up, this thing called video games came along.  I didnt get hooked because video games either cost a lot of quarters to play, that limited me usually to three games, or your parents had to buy you some little gameboy console as big as a big calculator.  I never got one.  I would have been addicted if I had had one. I spent a weekend at my cousins once and I couldnt get off their football gameboy game all weekend.  It was so wonderful.  

But did I stop reading books? Well I am not a good example. I couldnt get addicted because of lack of money, but NO, I did not stop reading books.  Other people could play video games endlessly.  By the 90s video games were serious time consumers and BIG, much bigger than when I was doing pac man in the 80s.  That s the time people who are fathers now spent their time as a nerd addicted to video games.   

Did the sale of books go down?   

Then we have to skip twenty years to the second decade of the 2000s, even mid 2010 - 2020 to see the next trend coming in.  Social networking and scrolling.  

Has social networks, scrolling networks, like Tik Tok permanently killed reading books which started dying from the onset of TV?   Are people still reading books? Or does the population have no cross over? In other words those who watch Tik Tok dont read books and vice versa.  

The problem is teenagers.  Teenagers start reading books.  Are they now lost to Tik tok?  I have to sadly add that while I only have anecdotal evidence which isnt worth much, my teen ager has stopped reading books.  Largely, I have to say, due to her addiction to Tik Tok and other short videos on internet. And still video games. 

You can blame me and say, well why dont you limit her phone, apps use?  Yes, I would have liked to and actually my wife did, but it didnt work. Our daughter usually found a way around the time limits.  Now all we can say is "time to shut it down."   "10pm, turn it off, time to get ready for bed." But it is self administered. Those people who say control it better.... it is difficult and there are other variables.  Ie, she can say she is doing homework.  Since a lot of the homework these days is done onliine, how can I doubt her?   So I cant take her phone away.  I wish we could put her on the app time limit.  But I am afraid to ask my wife to do that as she will just blow her top at me that we already tried that and I wasnt in favor of it or didnt care.  Which isnt true, I just was a bit oblivious at the time to the whole picture.  

Anyway, aside from that anecdote, I really want to know if the age group which

would be affected by all these new diversions, from TV to video games to apps, are they really leaving book reading? Were they ever there? Former president George W Bush never read books by his own account when he was growing up.  Or is the population always the same.  I am talking about teenagers now.  Or are they able to split their time properly between books and game addiction?    

These are the statistics, the charts I want to see.  For teenagers.   

Easter time.  Happy Easter. 

First I listened to an album just coming out at this time.  Its a cover of Slayer tracks done... slower.  I will get it for sale. And then when I was making corrections I listened to an old classic rock out. One of the best live Jams ever made.  Dark Star, on LIVE DEAD lp.