Reading Rates Among American Adults
Cover image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay
By Althea Need Kaminske
As the days get shorter and the nights longer, I increasingly find myself wanting to stay inside to read a good book. A recent study by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London shows that I am in the minority of Americans. They found a consistent decline in Americans reading for pleasure(1). The numbers are sobering: the amount of time Americans spend reading for pleasure has decreased, on average, 3% each year for the past 20 years. In 2004, when I graduated high school, 28% of Americans read for pleasure. I think I had a vague awareness of this at the time, and prior to reading this article if you had asked me how often people read for pleasure I would have guessed somewhere in that range. By 2023, however, that number had dropped to 16%.
In this paper, the authors looked at data from the American Time Use Survey that asked people to describe what they did over a 24 hour window. A total of 236,270 people completed the survey once between 2003 and 2023. The authors excluded data from 2020 due to methodological issues from COVD-19. In the survey participants were asked to recall what they did over the 24 hrs in the day previous to the interview. Think back to yesterday, starting at 4am and going until 4am this morning. Did you read for pleasure at all during that 24 hr period? If so, for how long?
The paper gives a number of fascinating insights. People who are more likely to read tend to be older, women, white, have postgraduate degrees, and make more than $100k. However, the trends change a little when it’s broken down by time spent reading by those who read. Older adults do spend more time reading than other age groups, but all the other differences between groups are slight. There is very little difference between men and women in how much time they spend reading. The race data looks noisy - varying quite a bit year to year. The level of degree attainment does not seem to change the amount of time spent reading. And finally, there is a small, but consistent, difference between how much time people at different income levels spend reading. Those who make less than $30k spend the most time reading and those who make $100k or more spend the least time reading.
The authors speculated as to why reading rates have decreased. They present some evidence that suggests that time for reading has simply been replaced by other forms of media. This has been debated, but by and large declines in reading are correlated with a rise in use of digital media (1). They note that even if people are not consciously choosing to replace reading with other forms of media (i.e. social media, tv, movies, etc.), the presence of digital devices presents many opportunities for distraction from reading (6).
It was also interesting to learn that the impacts of reading may depend on the type of reading you are engaging in. Previous studies have found differences in the benefits for reading fiction, non-fiction, and news. Reading fiction compared to non-fiction may provide more opportunities to develop linguistic skills, creativity, imagination, theory of mind, and/or emotion regulation (1). Whereas reading the news may increase stress (7). However, the survey did not distinguish between these different types of reading so all were counted in the reading rates presented above.
As Bone and colleagues (2025) point out, the rates and time spent reading by adult readers can have major impacts on rates of depression, stress (2,3), and can affect sleep (4). In this light, addressing low reading rates can be framed as a public health initiative. These factors contributed to the Biden administration releasing an executive order on promoting the arts, humanities, museum, and library services in America (5). These initiatives have largely been reversed in 2025.
After looking through this paper I am even more inclined to pick up a book in the evenings. Reading for just 20 minutes would put me well above the average (16 minutes a day in 2023, down from a little over 20 in 2024)(1). I tend to read fiction anyways, but now I have another reason to avoid the news, particularly before bed. I hope you are also able to pick up a book to light you through the dark nights ahead.
References
Bone, J. K., Bu, Feifei, Sonke, J. K., & Fancourt, D. (2025). The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey. iScience, 28(9), 113288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113288
Dowrick, C., Billington, J., Robinson, J., Harmer, A., & Williams, C. (2012). Get into reading as an intervention for common mental health problems: exploring catalysts for change. Medical Humanities, 38, 15-20. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2011-010083
Carney J, Robertson C (2022) Five studies evaluating the impact on mental health and mood of recalling, reading, and discussing fiction. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0266323. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266323
Finucane, E., O’Brien, A., Treweek, S. et al. Does reading a book in bed make a difference to sleep in comparison to not reading a book in bed? The People’s Trial—an online, pragmatic, randomised trial. Trials 22, 873 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-021-05831-3
Biden, J. R. (2022) Executive order on promoting the arts, humanities, museum, and library services in American. The White House, 2022 https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/09/30/executive-order-on-promoting-the-arts-the-humanities-and-museum-and-library-services/
OECD (2023), PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en
De Hoog, N. & Verboon, P. (2020). Is the news making us unhappy? The influence of daily news exposure on emotional states. British Journal of Psychology, 111, 157-173. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12389
