Everywhere I turn, I am told there is a reading crisis. Multiple YouTube videos and a never-ending series of articles in Vox and The Atlantic claim that people are reading fewer books than ever beforeâand this decline is said to be worrisome. Iâve even seen that we might revert back to a society where knowledge is only spread verbally, making us all vulnerable to demagoguery and formulaic slogans.
Figuring out if this catastrophe is real or not requires looking at imperfect survey data and an important historical context. While I donât think the situation is as cataclysmic as you may have heard, reading books is indeed not as popular as it once was. The negative repercussions of this downward trend could affect something our Office holds dear: critical thinking skills.
The decline is real
An influential think piece on this issue is undoubtedly Rose Horowitchâs article published a year ago in The Atlantic and called The gist of it is that students arrive in college with difficulty reading whole books, in large part because assigned readings in high school have shifted away from books and toward short-form texts.
The lionâs share of her piece is spent giving voice to some of the 33 professors she spoke to after admitting that âno comprehensive data exist on this trend.â It would be easy to dismiss the article by mentioning that the plural of âanecdoteâ is not âdata;â but that would be facetious. When enough people complain of something, there is reason to investigate. Anecdotes are woefully imperfect data but they shouldnât be casually tossed aside.
I could likewise belittle these complaints by pointing out that adults have always looked at the latest generation with a âtsk tskâ and a shaking of the head. âKids these daysâ rhetoric goes back millennia. Paul Fairie has a thread on this on Bluesky: the San Francisco Examiner decried in that âpeople donât read anymore, they just watch television,â and the Times Herald from complained that ânobody reads any more; at any rate, in France. The book is dying.â Someone needs to go back to 1907 and tell that journalist about Harry Potter and John Grisham.
I could also point to the explosion of BookTok and Bookstagram, where it seems everyone is going on shopping sprees to purchase tall piles of books every month. But these social influencers are not representative of the population as a whole, and buying a book does not imply reading that book. Bound paper, after all, is also an esthetic.
Luckily, we donât need to rely purely on anecdotes: we have modern data on this, even though it is not comprehensive. Unfortunately, it relies on self-reports.
When researchers ask participants to report their behaviour, they know that those answers can be influenced by many things. Do people accurately remember how many avocados they ate in the last year? But also, participants may skew their answer toward something they figure the researchers will find more acceptable: this is known as the social-desirability bias. If you know that smoking is frowned upon, you are likely to downplay the number of cigarettes you smoke when filling out a form. When people self-report their height and weight, researchers will often use based on studies that have been done where the self-reports were compared to measurements taken by a professional.
Reading books is often seen as desirable: itâs a sign of curiosity and intelligence. Therefore, we can assume that the number of books a person reports having read in the last year or the amount of time they say they spend reading might be somewhat inflated.
Keeping this in mind, we can look at survey data which, again and again, shows that recreational reading has indeed gone down in recent years. (Most of these surveys include ebooks and audiobooks when they ask how many books they have read.)
In the United States, the average number of books that adults claim to have read in the last year (a number that has always been inflated, I suspect) went from 15.6 in 2016 to 12.6 in 2022. The numbers come from , whose author argues that the decline is not because fewer Americans are reading books, but because avid readers are consuming fewer books. In 1978, 40% of U.S. adults reported having read 11 or more books in the last year; in 2022, it was . If we focus on American children and teenagers, the decline over time remains. The of 9-year-olds who say they read for fun almost every day fell from 53% (2012) to 42% (2020) to 39% (2022), with an even larger relative slump for 13-year-olds: 27% (2012) down to 17% (2020) to 14% (2023).
While I did not find historical data on reading habits in Quebec, never-readers, according to , represent about 1 in 5 adults. In the United Kingdom, 1 in 4 people aged 8 to 18 says they do not enjoy reading at all, and the fraction that devours books is , going from 1 in 2 in 2005 down to 1 in 3 today.
There is also a well-established âfiction gapâ among the genders: women are more interested in fiction than men and the opposite is true for nonfiction. A of 41 studies published a few years ago confirmed it, but the exact size of this gender gap is not consistent from study to study. (Men are often said to look down on novels as a waste of time, betraying a productivity mindset.) Regardless of gender, though, we tend to be avid readers early in life; somewhere between middle school and high school graduation, recreational reading takes a sharp plunge. Indeed, a done in France last year exemplifies this drop: almost all 13-to-15-year-olds say they read books from time to time, but only two thirds of 16-to-19-year-olds do so.
The reading decline is real, but we shouldnât believe there ever was a prolonged golden age. Illiteracy was rampant not too long ago, and the mass printing of books and magazines really only took off . Do you know what else became popular around that time? Television, long accused of seducing the population away from books. Even today, time spent reading must be contextualized within rates of illiteracy: (roughly 2 in 7) can only understand short texts and lists, if they can read at all, while the same can be said of (roughly 1 in 5).
As far as student reading scores are concerned, meaning tests involving the comprehension of texts, they have been in the U.S. since their introduction in 1969. As a professor of cognition and education was quoted as saying quite pithily, what we see there is âa very stable level of mediocrity.â
What we are really losing
Why are people reading fewer books in recent years? Nobody knows for sure. Some surveys have directly asked the question. Respondents offer a number of answers: they have no time, they have trouble concentrating, or theyâd rather do something else.
Television used to be blamed; now, of course, itâs smartphones and the Internet.
There is no denying that social media is a major source of distraction, feeding our brain bite-sized moments of disgust, anger, and envy. A bookâunchanging and often devoid of picturesâcan hardly compete.
There is also a swarm of minor reasons that may play a role, with some being more recent than others. A number of educational reforms in the United States moved children away from learning to break new words down into individual sounds (âphonicsâ), with many experts criticizing this approach, especially as standardized tests took over and teachers relied more and more on short-text comprehension in the classroom. Part-time jobs among college students leads to overscheduling, and the probably donât help with carving out time to sit down and read a book. And if a student doesnât love reading and becomes a teacher (or, even more commonly, a parent), it will be hard for them to inspire a new generation of students to embrace books. (This is known as , after the Bibleâs St. Peter who was asked for money and replied that he had neither silver nor gold to give.)
The more philosophical question here is why we should be concerned that fewer books are getting read. Do we care about reading per se? In which case, itâs safe to say that we all read much more than previous generations: text messages, Instagram posts, websites, emails, even closed captions on the TV shows and movies we watch because the sound mix is suboptimal.
Are we instead worried because we deprive ourselves of a novelâs storytelling and thus lose opportunities to develop empathy? I would argue that we are bathing in stories. In the U.S. alone, roughly are released every year. Thatâs not counting the released in that country annually, as well as foreign releases, older movies and TV shows, video games, and storytelling podcasts. We face an embarrassment of riches when it comes to fiction.
No, the real concern is deep readingânot just scanning a short text, getting a hit of dopamine, and gaining a superficial understanding, but instead spending hours inside a writerâs brain by pouring over their book. Professor Maryanne Wolf is perhaps the loudest proponent of this concept, arguing that shallow reading of the sort we do online, buzzing from one post to the next, doesnât give us the time to analyze, criticize, infer, and deduce. We gobble it up but donât learn as much from it. We risk defaulting to motivated reasoningâthis agrees with me, I like it; this disagrees with me, I hate itâwithout ever sharpening our intellectual tools. Thus, our ability to discern misinformation, to spot scams, to avoid being manipulatedâeven democracy itselfâhangs in the balance.
A cultural shift
Discussions of technological change are always in danger of tipping over from âwasâ to âought.â âThis is how things were like when I was kid,â we say, âand therefore itâs important that they stay this way. This is how things ought to be.â Iâve seen this with the panic over the so-called Google effect. Do we really need to memorize phone numbers, as we did when I was growing up? Are we truly regressing as a species by no longer committing strings of numbers to memory and relying on our smartphone? I doubt it. When navigating these waters, we must remember that moral panics are always just beneath the surface, ready to grab and drown us.
I was struck by a comparison found in Horowitchâs article about the college students who canât read a book. A few professors told her that their students liken people reading books to hipsters listening to vinyl records. Itâs an anachronism-turned-fringe-hobby. (Itâs not a perfect analogy: albums are still available digitally, whereas a novel is not replaced by a series of tweets.) Marion Thain, a professor of culture and technology at Kingâs College London, wrote in response to modern studentsâ lack of motivation with reading Charles Dickens: âIs it not possible that the 19th-century novel, much loved by many Boomers and members of Gen X, is becoming for some in the younger generations as much of a slog as the 18th-century novel was for many literature students of the 1990s?â
I devoured books as a child and teenager. I struggled with books as an adult, too often distracted by work and social media. Iâve recently managed to carve out more time to enjoy both nonfiction works and novels, and Iâm very happy with what reading brings to my life.
I am concerned about this collective decline in reading. I worry about what fragmentary, short-form reading online is doing to our ability to evaluate claims and arguments, especially as we face a mounting deluge of misinformation and, letâs use the academic term here, âwhich risks swelling even more due to generative AI.
Just how worrisome is this decline in book reading? I donât yet know. I look forward to reading a meaty, well-researched tome on the subject.
Take-home message:
- People are on average reading fewer books than they used to
- Itâs unclear what is driving this decline, although the biggest culprit may be the rise of social media
- There is also a gender divide, with women typically reading more fiction than men do and vice versa for nonfiction
- While we are reading more text than ever before and are exposed to empathy-generating fiction through movies, television, video games, and audio content, the real worry is a decline in âdeep readingâ skills which could leave us more vulnerable to misinformation and bad arguments
