The likelihood that a person will finish reading a book doesn’t have anything to do with gender. However, women are more likely to stick with a book they don’t like than men, according to a new study from Jellybooks.
For the research, participating readers read hundreds of different free e-books. These books were embedded with software called candy.js, which tracked reader data and at what point, if any, the reader stopped along in the story. “The initial decline during which most readers are lost is much sharper and earlier for men than it is for women, and this is a behavior that we observe for the majority of books,” explained Jellybooks founder Andrew Rhomberg in a post on Digital Book World. Here is an excerpt of his analysis:
…men give up on a book much sooner than women do. Given the identical completion rates, we take this to mean that men either have more foresight in this regard or that women continue reading even if they already know that the book is not to their liking. We suspect the latter, but cannot prove it at this point.