Evidence that reading is a good use of time

Famous People on Reading

Bill Gates

Interviewer: Tell us more about your childhood. What books were important to you as a kid?
Bill Gates: Well, I read a lot. There were always contests at the library, in the summer, where if you read ten books you got a little gold star, if you read 20 you got two. And there were five or six girls and I that would always read like 35 books, and we'd see who could do the most. It was a broad set of things. Eventually a fair bit of science fiction, because that intrigued me. Some biographies, understanding what different leaders had done and how they'd picked what they wanted to do. So I'd say science fiction and biographies were the categories that had the most impact.
Source: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gat0int-2

Mark Cuban

I read every book and magazine I could. Heck, 3 bucks for a magazine, 20 bucks for a book. One good idea that lead to a customer or solution and it paid for itself many times over. Some of the ideas i read were good, some not. In doing all the reading I learned a valuable lesson.

Everything I read was public. Anyone could buy the same books and magazines. The same information was available to anyone who wanted it. Turns out most people didn’t want it.

I remember going into customers or talking to people in the industry and tossing out tidbits about software or hardware. Features that worked, bugs in the software. All things I had read. I expected the ongoing response of “Oh yeah, I read that too in such-and-such.” That’s not what happened. They hadn’t read it then, and they haven’t started reading yet.