"There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book."

From this article:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_ill...

The first half I believe comes from John Taylor Gatto's analysis of the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm

Which he shouldn't have been using in 2008, because the 2003 data had already been released well before at that point. The primary source is here:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=93275

The next two statistics seem to originate from this article:

http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cf...

However, if you read it you'll notice that A) Almost none of the claims are sourced and B) many of them contradict each other C) They completely contradict the data from the government's survey on citizen's participation in literature and the arts: http://www.nea.gov/pub/readingatrisk.pdf.

Thus, leading me to believe that most of the 'statistics' are in fact entirely apocryphal to begin with.