Ice hockey fans, usually home reading.

What? Can it be? Is reading more popular than ice hockey up in the Great White North? Well, my don’t-bother-me-it’s-almost-Super-Bowl-weekend-friends, it just might be so. According to this report in Toronto’s Globe and Mail:

Canadians bought or borrowed more than 2.7-million books last week. A book count organized by the National Campaign for Reading, covering about three-quarters of the book market and library systems serving 11.2 million Canadians, came up with a total of 2,714,946 for the week of Jan. 10 to 16.

And while the tally didn’t take into account e-book sales, it did account for both the English and French book markets, as well as libraries serving approximately one third of the Canadian populous.

And all this maniacal counting was done as part of a campaign to draw attention to reading on the eve of the National Campaign for Reading’s second Reading Summit, which begins in Montreal this week. The Globe and Mail reported that, “Organizers figure more Canadians picked out a book last week than watched hockey on TV.”

What could it mean?