alt Hacker News>I don't think this is a great metric of literacy
That's like saying drinking water is not a great metric of hydration.
>For one not all books are exactly high quality, and now more than ever there's a plethora of non-book written content available to us.
Yes, I'm pretty sure those 50%+ of people who "didn't read a single book" did it to avoid all the less than high quality books, or because they were busy consuming high quality non-book written content online.
> Yes, I'm pretty sure those 50%+ of people who "didn't read a single book" did it to avoid all the less than high quality books,
You misinterpret, the implication of quality is that having read a book is not indicative of value, someone could have a high metric "I read 10 books a year" but they're all short, low quality romance novels. Whereas someone could clam "I read no books a year" but they're a grad student with no time for novels.
by the "books read" metric the former would score much better and appear more literate.