By Jeremy Schlosberg

     As baby boomers age and their children leave home, they are reading more, according to a study from the NPD Group.
    Likewise, boomers are watching more television as they grow older.
    According to the study, 45- to 65-year-olds spend 19 more minutes reading each day than 24- to 40-year-olds. The differences are especially pronounced at the two ends of the adult age spectrum. People under 30 read only 24 minutes a day, while people 55 to 64 read 53 minutes a day, well over twice as much.
     The older age group also spends 32 more minutes per day watching TV.
     The shift in reading seems to occur when people are in their forties. Average reading times among all under-40 age groups is 31 minutes or less. By age 45, however, the average reading time per day rises to 41 minutes, and it goes up from there.
    The question remains, however, what are they reading? The numbers released from The NPD Group study are not specific. But another recent study suggests the answer may be magazines.
    While the rise of the internet appears to be draining people from other media, it appears to be having no effect on magazine readership. The study, by Fairfield Research, shows that magazine readership was actually up 24 percent between 1995 and 1998, precisely the period  when the web was making its greatest inroads into the American household.
    Fairfield also compared total time reading consumer and trade publications in print to time spent reading consumer and business information online and found that people are still spending much more time with so-called old-fashioned media. The average adult American spends 45 minutes a day reading consumer and trade publications, and less than eight and a half minutes reading similar material on line.
    Email, chats and similar online activities were factored out of the online times.
    And so Fairfield concludes that the average American spends more than five times as much time reading print publications as he or she spends reading online information.

 -Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.