September 24, 2020 - Summer Reading Results

The Summer Reading Program ended August 31st. At last, all the books have been counted, all the pages and minutes read accounted for, and I can finally give you all the numbers about how many people read how many books. Every year, for more years than I care to remember, I have been reporting the number of pages read in concrete terms. I have converted the number of pages read (or pages listened to, or time spent reading) into inches, then converted those inches into miles, and then plotted that number of miles on a map. Since I have been doing this annually for enough years for this to have become a tradition, and since I’m wise enough not to tamper with a fine tradition, here goes!

This year 345 people signed up for the Summer Library Program. Over 14,000 books were read. The books read convert to 1,068,524 pages. That’s almost 3,100 pages read by every participant.

There were 1,408 activities completed. 120 reviews were written and 3,067 badges were earned>

Now, on to the calculations which begin with this question: “If you laid all the pages of the books that were read end-to-end how many miles would they stretch?” The average size of a page is 9 inches tall which gives us (1,068,524 times 9” or) 9,616,716 inches—always show your work if you want to receive full credit. Then we take those inches and divide by 12 to give us 801,393 feet and then divide by 5,280 to give us 151.8 miles. And, voilà! If you laid all the pages read during the Summer Reading Program end to end and drove north and west via I90/ 94 to LaCrosse then up Hwy 14 to Winona, MN and to the parking lot of the Great River Shakespeare Festival near 450 Johnson Street. Heading south via I 90 those miles would put you on the street where I lived growing up in Oak Park, IL. How cool is that? Even though this was a really unusual year which made for a really unusual Summer Reading Program a whole lot of reading was done! Congratulations to all the Summer Reading participants.