2 in 5 Americans did not read a single book in 2025(mybooklist.club) |
2 in 5 Americans did not read a single book in 2025(mybooklist.club) |
Reading is so much more than curated dead trees.
After you've done about 50 or so major classics, selected broadly from different thinkers and authors, it is clear the vast majority of most books have negligible additional value. This can all be done quickly in your late teens to early twenties, after that, there is no real need to read more than a book or two in a year, and even then, it is not usually worth reading those one or two in entirety.
Digital textual sources like the ones you mention have far more continued and sustained value at this point.
Agreed to your larger point that reading is of itself not worthwhile. Reading great works of literature broadly is.
But then I kind of thought, for most people, that is probably overkill. If you stick with just one text from each great author, 50 is still a huge variety relative I think to what was available to people in the past. More is great, but not necessary: there are plenty of other sources of depth in life beyond texts, and text doesn't work well for everyone either.
EDIT: Nvm
A lot of people who say they “read books” really mean they bought one or checked it out from the library, then only dipped into it here and there, maybe a few paragraphs at a time.
I haven’t read a proper book cover to cover in years, probably not since high school. But I do read a lot every single day, either for my job or because I genuinely want to grow professionally. I’ll also read a few chapters from books friends or coworkers recommend, especially the parts that seem most relevant. I just don’t really see why I need to finish the whole thing if I’m already getting what I came for.
My parents, meanwhile, will read the same books over and over again, cover to cover, every year.
Note that this isn't an oblique way to frame your preferences as bad. They're simply a different kind of activity, like how writing commit messages is a different activity than writing a novel. There are different activities even within this definition of "reading". I primarily consume new books. My spouse usually re-reads old ones. One of us is better equipped for literary analysis while the other is better equipped for relatable conversations with normal people, but neither is a more "correct" way to read.
"Sustained reading for entertainment" sounds like an ordeal rather than delight.
I have nothing against audiobooks, but they are not the same as reading. It is a passive consumption of the content. You can daydream or lose focus and the story keeps rolling on. If you lose focus while reading, the story stops. You may find that you've "read" a few sentences, but it's quickly self-correcting.
Additionally, reading forces you to parse tone, interpret context, and resolve syntactic ambiguity on your own. Listening to a narrator removes those tasks.
I think that this door was opened when we started accepting that reading graphic novels was the same as reading a book of text. Rather than elevating new(ish) media for storytelling for their own merit, we've lumped them into another medium that was already deemed "good".
All that said, listening to an audiobook or reading a graphic novel is still better than not reading a book at all.
1: https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/53804-most-a...
This is quite different from tv and film where you're just watching and not using your mind.
It is a self-reported measure, and it's phrased "read or listened to"--I don't normally think of "listening to audiobooks" when I think about reading, and I can imagine how that might broaden the pool. Other sources (e.g. the NEA survey at [0]) seem to put print book readership closer to 50%.
Though at least one survey [1] points out the wide range of genres that count as books for this purpose: manga, the Bible/Torah/Quran, cookbooks...
[0] https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-... [1] https://gitnux.org/readership-statistics/
I don't know, my reaction is "wow, Americans truly love reading," or alternatively, "they really like to boast their numbers even in anonymous surveys."
Even if you only read fiction, 8 books are like 500k to 100k words. That's a lot of words!
> 21% of U.S. adults are classified as functionally illiterate, unable to complete basic reading tasks.
These days when it comes to technical stuff I much more prefer to fill in gaps by reading articles or documentation. Technical books are so long it feels like authors are paid by words.
And when it comes to fiction I have really leaned into audiobooks. My eyes are too tired from computer work, and I can combine audio with other activities like jogging or cooking.
There are some "technical" audiobooks as well, but only a small category of technical books makes sense in the audio format.
If you click the article it actually says "read or listened", so this includes also audiobooks, which is cheating, those 60% would shrink significantly without audiobooks.
And I don't think this is really US specific, it won't be much better elsewhere, most of the people just don't have energy/time to read book, they will rather watch content or read shorter articles.
Me as European also didn't read (or listened) book in years, I don't see the added value. After working and taking care of kids I will watch movie/TV show and maybe short time Youtube. I have to read lot of law documents and user guides as part of my work, those can be longer than some short books though, so not sure what this tells about me.
Meanwhile my kids are bookworms, they can easily read 5 books per week and I read book to them every evening (I didn't count these as my books, it's books for kids, I read to them for sure at least 20-30 books per year).
But! We take our kids to the library every couple of weeks, and while we do let them check out Nintendo games, they also will each pick a stack of books. So my kids are going through 4-8 books a month. And my wife is part of a book club at the library so she's doing 8-10 in a year at least.
But for myself, I just have a hard time sitting down to do it. By the time I'm done with work and chores, it's late at night, and my brain barely has enough power to handle a TV show.
How do all y'all readers with young kids do it? How do you find the time?
Take the TV time and trade it for reading a page or two before turning the TV on. I think it just requires some time to adapt to generating a second wave of energy. It won't be there most days.
The alternative is coffee. I did a two month stint of sleeping only 11pm-4a last year (had a single 1.5 yr kid at the time). It was tough and ultimately my body's mechanics started to fail, so I don't recommend that. Now that I have two under 3, I strive for more sleep and therefore only a chapter per week (or a section per week on math/science textbooks).
Science fiction and fantasy work well. The Dungeon Crawler Carl books really help my brain take a break without actively disengaging the actual thinking parts.
I feel like I'm doing it wrong (or maybe right?), but I don't have that time. I'm asleep a minute after I lay down. In fact it's been an issue because the kids sometimes want me to lay down with them to fall asleep, and then I fall asleep in their bed!
When I looked closer in the app it's because all of my books are 99% finished because I didn't click in every page until the end. Annoying.
I use my garmin connect app to track exercise, blood pressure, water consumption, etc. it would be cool to have something similar for the mind.
The reduction is from a lot more time spent on educational series on YouTube and other paid video sources. Is it intrinsically bad if I trade 1 book for 10 hours of instructional videos?
Much of the rest is people who exclusively read very easy books from one or two genres (“romance”, true crime, airport thriller/mystery, young-adult fantasy, and self-help/business-guru, mostly). That’s especially going to dominate the shelves of the set of folks with books-read counts far higher than one per year. Whether that crowd counts much toward a measure of the exercise of quality, general literacy, is a judgement call, but those readers are the engine of what little remains of the market for new books.
(There’s a niche market that’s commercially viable that involves books laser-focused at being optioned for TV or movies, but it’s as cliquish as you’d expect and hard to break into, and of course other genres still support a tiny number of super-stars)
[1] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/docume...
Yes it includes audiobooks in "books".
physical books were around three times more popular than ebooks or audiobooks.
75% did not read anything to children (kind of surprising 25% of the population has access to pre-literate children)
15% don't read books they own, which is surprisingly high. A third borrowed their books from the library.
54% of the population inaccurately think they "own" an ebook as opposed to reality. 40% "a book you accessed for free online" Sure thats all project gutenberg LOL.
Mysteries and Crime are top of the charts. I have no idea if "computer books" count as 11% other non-fiction or academic or hobbies.
Only 51% have a library card. I know they are cracking down hard at my library, show up physically with proof of residence or it gets cancelled. Its harder to get a library card in my community than to vote, get a job, or register for school, your community may vary.
Most people go to the library less than once a month. This sounds about right.
Shockingly 20% of people never go to the library just to hang out. As a parent of older kids I do that a LOT, drop them off then go silently read or compute or whatever at the library. The attempt at turning libraries from book warehouses into makerspaces seems to not be working very well according to this survey.
People own a surprisingly small number of books. A "large full height bookcase" puts you in the elite. I'm kind of surprised at that.
Virtually no one hoards digital or audio books, I am apparently a far extreme outlier in that regard LOL. I'm easily five figures each. From, uh, totally legit sources.
Most people actually own about two dozen books and think most other people own about twice as many around fifty.
Since I was a little kid I always read a little before bedtime and it seems this is very popular.
Most people don't organize their books but think they have an easy time finding them (not unlike how people organize computer files...)
Surprisingly there is zero to very minimal demographic difference in every category among people who do not read, which I find very surprising and unlikely.
Just thinking "reading books" is something good or impressive borders on anti-intellectual in the world of the internet. A much better indicator of real intelligence is e.g., does a person read actual scientific papers or technical documents, or sites like ACX, HN, SeriousEats (or any other site which dives into any hobby or art with research and with long-form articles), do they know about e.g. SciHub and LibGen and Anna's Archive, do they know about people like James Hoffmann if they are into coffee, or Kenji Lopez if into home cooking, and I'm sure hundreds of other careful and obscure podcasts and individuals, discussion forums, and other digital textual sources.
Yes, please have read some serious books and works in your life, at some point (preferably some classic and modern literature and philosophy, but anything with real depth is good). But worship of "books" simpliciter is pure midwit in 2025 (and was so already in 2010, at bare minimum).
If I were to sit down in my book corner chair, putting on an audiobook and leaning back, I can imagine I'd have the same experience as you, but that is when I would otherwise read a book the traditional way. Perhaps this will change when I get older and wish to rest my eyes and arms while taking in a book.
Put another way, reading involves:
1. Parsing and interpreting the words on the page.
2. Synthesizing the information in our heads (scenes, arguments, etc.)
3. Interpreting the synthesis (Does it work? Is there subtle or implied information in the synthesis? What comes next?)
My argument is that audiobooks drastically alter step 1.
Let's not denigrate any forms of media though. They all have their unique benefits. You can use your mind or not during the consumption of any of them.
Series is really what makes the number so high IMO. I read a lot of fanasy/sci-fi which is often a lot of trilogies. Reading just one trilogy puts you above the median. I have several friends that read only 3-4 books last year, but several that also read as much or more than me. Discussing the books amongst friends helps, as we recommend books to each other. Book-tok and other book-centric social-media circles are huge.
And it may seem like a lot but that was spread across an entire year. I often read a few chapters before bed each night, but it often depends on how hooked I am on the book, I make more time for it when I'm more hooked on a book, or on a deadline to return the book to the library.
Audiobooks helps carry the number higher as well. Its a lot easier to "read" a book when you can do it while doing other things. Although I prefer to sit down and dedicate time for e-books, I do listen to some audiobooks as well, and many of my friends exclusively read via audiobooks.
It's starting to sound like reading books has a similar distribution as consuming cannabis. The "daily" users account for 3/4ths of the spending on cannabis despite being 1/3rd of overall users. The heavy consumers consume A LOT and skew the statistics.
I retired last year, my wife and I count reading among our hobbies. Our library offers two services that loan ebooks.
I’ll read about 8 or 10 books a month, maybe finishing half. Wifey reads at a ferocious pace, completely reading a book every day or two.
It’s nice.
At the start of this year I read through Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. This book wasn't telling me anything new, but it reminded me of a lot of things that I had forgotten while making me hold space for those ideas related to creativity.
Sometimes I encounter criticism of Newton for having "wasted" time studying and learning alchemy, and people lament how much more he could've gotten done if it wasn't for those distractions. But we don't know if those alchemy-related detours are load-bearing for his achievements!
The sweetest of fruits is fertilized by mountains of shit.
Nothing you've said here is push-back or contradicts anything I've said, IMO.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying slop, junk food, fast food, camp, kitsch, low-brow entertainment, or any kind of mindless dreck or low-quality anything. The same goes for enjoying mediocrity. It would be hell to only ever spend time consuming tedious, difficult, challenging, or novel things.
What is wrong is pretending that a broad category like "books" is any kind of indicator of intelligence or meaningful cultural cachet. I.e. "'Americans are reading less books' is bad" suggests zero consideration of things like differences in value and depth, and that is what is anti-intellectual (or midwit) about such remarks.
Instructions for the education of daughters, 1750
Replace "read" with "consume" for contemporary relevance, or to make it particularly clear how dumb "Reading [consuming] lots is good".
EDIT - A contemporary bestselling book example: https://www.amazon.com/Morning-Glory-Milking-Cambric-Creek-e...
You can read how you want, of course. The consequence is sometimes simply that you close yourself off from other aspects of the medium. There aren't many aspects bigger than narrative structure, but that's your choice to make.
Now, I use audiobooks because I can then take the dog for a walk and do other chores while listening to them. For me, it's a good way to get my mind working while my body is too. Plus, you can speed up the narration to some multiple so you're at the same pace as if you were reading anyway.
For me, it's no different than if I were a cigar roller with someone reading out a book to the lot of us.
Is it exactly the same? No, of course not. But if the alternatives to doing chores is 1) doing them with no auditory enjoyment 2) doing them with some podcast/radio station blaring topical news 3) doing them with a classic book
then, I'm going for 3. It's just the best use of time
The quality of books they are reading, or the quantity?
Win win baby. They get easy to digest fun stories, and I get to read fun books that I like.
Also, and everyone will tell you this but I can't stress enough how true it is, value your time with them when they're little. It's exhausting, awful, stressful, and seriously exhausting (yes that gets two call outs), but it goes so fast. It just goes so fast. You get into a groove and it's five years later. Then ten. They're only little once, and while that means you should try your best to make sure they have a good childhood - seriously don't forget to enjoy them just for yourself. Be selfish. Snuggle them every chance you get. Hold their little hands. Carry them everywhere. Call in sick to work to play dress up or build a fort or just look at bugs. Skip social obligations to eat popcorn and watch a movie with them. Give them kisses and hugs and be selfish about it. It's for them but it's also for you. A lot of parents forget that.
It is also my uneducated guess that the actual percentage of Americans who haven’t read a single book in the past year is MUCH higher than 40%. Maybe a survey of HN commentators but not of the general population.