The ‘Reading Crisis’ Has Nothing to Do With ‘Screen Time’

I was on the MBTA commuter from Providence to South Station last week when — not for the first time — I noticed a distinctly contemporary phenomenon. Apart from a middle-aged gentleman sitting down the car reading the morning paper, almost everyone who was awake was glued to their phones.

So when I rummaged my library book out from my tote and opened it to start reading, I felt weirdly embarrassed; like I was doing something unusual, almost showy. I know this will seem laughable, but I felt faintly brave. Like I was doing something rebellious and indiscreet.

Today, I found that yet another reader has left me a comment on my story Why Aren't Remote Workers in the Library? to tell me that "nobody reads anymore."

Oh, the irony, right?

Medium alone has over a million paying subscribers. There's nothing else to do here but read, so it's for precisely that pleasure which we subscribers are paying. One of the platform's most successful independent publications, BAOS, has an engaged community of over one hundred thousand avid book devourers. You can't build that kind of success — as the publication's owner, Anangsha Alammyan, has done — on a corpse.

So when I rummaged my library book out from my tote and opened it to start reading, I felt weirdly embarrassed

And yet "books and reading are dead" has become one of those stock comments that infiltrate conversations without anyone really questioning it. Folks just nod along. They repeat it as if it's a cultural fact, robustly supported by the evidence.

But is it?

When someone says "nobody reads anymore," what are they actually describing? Are they truly reporting an established fact about our changing culture — or a fact about their own social world? Their household, maybe? The folks they see on their commute? Maybe their friends? And can we be confident that's a representative sample of the population and its reading habits as a whole?

Because there's a psychological term for this kind of unconscious perceptual bias, if that's what it is. It's called the false consensus effect. If you don't do something, it starts to feel to you like hardly anyone does it. If you do do something, you assume it's a common behavior.

The non-reader who declares reading dead may be telling the truth as they experience it: because they don't see books in the hands of people they know; they don't hear novels discussed at the dinner table; they don't have bookshelves at home; they don't know where their local library is; and they live in a world where reading anything longer than a text message isn't considered a normal adult habit.

…yet another reader has left me a comment […] to tell me that "nobody reads anymore." Oh, the irony, right?

From that vantage point, books might start to look like old-fangled esoteric artefacts of a bygone era — something exclusively for children at best; or retired folks, maybe university students, or that odd-ball ex-librarian on the 06:32.

Let's dig up some reliable facts; because I reckon it's worth separating out two questions that seem to get mashed together far too often when this claim comes up. Namely, are bookstores thriving or failing? And, do people still read for pleasure, and if they do, who are they and where are they hiding?

If we start with book sales, the picture looks surprisingly healthy.

In the US, print unit sales have risen steadily for two years in a row. Circana BookScan, reported in Publishers Weekly, counted about 762 million print books sold in 2025, a small increase over 2024, which itself edged up over 2023. That's an undeniable upward trend. Every year, people buy more books.

Sales peaked during the pandemic — when, not so incidentally, maybe, BookTok suddenly took off — and then settled at a level that still sits above the pre-Covid-19 years.

Adult fiction — especially fantasy, science fiction, and romance genres — drives a lot of that growth. While no-one in the book industry is declaring this a golden age in publishing, the presses are well-oiled and the global print industry generates over $65 billion in annual revenue, with print books accounting for 75% of all book sales.

The psychologist, Adam Mastroianni, in an article for Persuasion published at the end of January this year, points out another numerical fact with which it's hard to argue: independent bookstores are making a comeback. Hundreds have opened their doors — and stayed open — in the US in the last few years alone. Such a revival in indie bookstores can only be sustained when enough people keep walking in the door, browsing the shelves, and buying books, right?

Every year, people buy more books

The latest surveys of book reading habits in adults line up well with these numbers. For example, in the U.S., the National Endowment for the Arts' 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau) found that 48.5% of adults had read at least one book in the previous 12 months; when the question included reading books and/or listening to audiobooks, the share went up to 51.9%.

Even more recently, a YouGov poll found that in 2025, while a minority of 40% didn't read any books, of the majority 60% who did:

… 27% [of American adults] read one to four books. And 13% read five to nine books. That leaves 19% of Americans who read 10 or more books, including 9% who read 10 to 19 books, 6% who read 20 to 49 books, and 4% who say they read 50 or more books. The median American read two books in 2025. On average, Americans read eight books.

So far, these statistics clearly contradict the popular wisdom that "reading is dead." Books sell, indie bookstores are thriving, and most Americans read one to eight books a year.

Those are the facts; whatever a casual glance round on the MBTA commuter might suggest.

But…

The trouble begins when you factor in not only how many books we're reading, but how much time we spend with books, and who has enough leisure to read them. That's when the lens of rosy optimism gets smeared by a more sinister effect.

You see, there's another set of equally reliable numbers. But these give us additional insight. And some of them should be worrying; at least for anyone who cares about literacy and the value of reading for pleasure in a civilized, healthy, and equitable society.

A significant study based on the American Time Use Survey tracked leisure reading for 20 years between 2003 and 2023. The researchers found that on an average day in 2004, about 28 percent of Americans reported reading for pleasure (including books, magazines, newspapers, ebooks, audiobooks, and online news, but excluding social media). By 2023, that number had dropped to about 16 percent.

The same study also revealed that higher income and better education correlate with more reading; more women than men report reading for pleasure; White participants in the study reported reading more than Black participants; and people living in rural areas tended to read less than folks in cities and suburbs.

So, there's a clear class divide.

And now we need to mention our children.

The data also revealed that about 21 percent of respondents had a child under nine-years-old present in the household; but only 2 percent reported reading with a child. Now, that doesn't mean American parents never read to their kids. What it does mean, though, is that, on a national scale, parents reading with their kids may be relatively rare.

As a former librarian, a parent, and a social equity campaigner, I find that detail as worrying as the indications of socio-economic inequality and the class rift.

Shared parent-child reading time encourages literacy and a passion for books, of course. But robust scientific studies also show that it creates closer bonding, reduces parental stress, and helps children develop well-adjusted pro-social behaviors and emotional self-regulation. On the flip side, lack of shared reading time is strongly linked to higher stress and increased chances of children developing problematic behavior and difficulties with appropriate self-expression.

What it does mean, though, is that, on a national scale, parents reading with their kids may be relatively rare

Put all that together and you have a snapshot of a society riven by socio-economic inequalities in which the most disadvantaged are excluded from the benefits of reading (including a developmental buffer against anti-social behavior and emotional frustration) which further compounds their disadvantage and trips their children into the same socio-economic trap.

If you grew up with someone reading to you — or without someone reading to you— I wonder how much you think that experience shaped the way you read (or don't read) now?

It's easy for me — an economically privileged, college-educated, professional woman — leafing casually through the pages of Publishers Weekly in my spacious suburban Colonial, to claim that books and reading are alive and well. And it's true. But it's a blinkered truth because it ignores the millions of households where reading for pleasure is squeezed out by time poverty, money worries, and stifled aspirations.

If you're affluent, secure, had parents who read to you when you were a kid, work relatively short hours in a pleasant environment at a job you love, and you live in a neighborhood with a well-funded library and a charming indie bookstore, of course you're more likely to curl up on the sofa for a few hours with a novel after dinner.

If you're in debt, low paid, working long shifts in dirt and noise doing something you hate, never graduated high school and had parents who didn't read or read to you; even if you pick up a book when you get home, and even if that home isn't cramped and chaotic and rundown, you're much less likely to have either the physical and mental energy or the emotional bandwidth available to read it.

Put all that together and you have a snapshot of a society riven by socio-economic inequalities in which the most disadvantaged are excluded from the benefits of reading

So we have a situation in which a privileged minority sustains healthy book sales and has the time and money to support a regular habit of reading for pleasure. That gives us the first set of statistics we examined. These people tell us that reading is alive and well.

But we also have a situation in which a significant chunk of the population includes people too poor, too hungry, and too stressed for reading even to come within their radar. That gives us the second set of statistics and these people tell us that reading is dead.

And then there's a third subset of the population that falls somewhere between; the folks who maybe read one book a year on vacation or occasionally listen to an audiobook on the daily commute. They tell us that reading is alive but in decline.

You may well be in the "readers' circle," as you're here reading this; but maybe your life forces you to belong to the the non-reader circle as a rule and this is an exception? Or maybe you're somewhere in the middle — someone who loves reading but only finds time for it on occasions like your annual vacation? And maybe which circle you find yourself in has changed across different seasons of your life.

I doubt it's clear-cut. All three perspectives are true. What you see just depends on where you're standing. But it also depends on what you mean by "reading".

So far we've concentrated on traditional print book sales, eBooks, and audiobooks; and on reading novels and other long form literature. But that's only one kind of reading. What about reading online? What about blogs, news outlets, forums, online magazines, and user-generated content sites, essay platforms and fan fiction?

Will factoring in those kinds of reading change the picture?

If we widen the lens to encompass everything we read on screens — social media posts, texts, ads, headlines, captions — then the "reading is dead" idea falls apart completely. But it still doesn't make the class divide, or the decline in reading purely for pleasure, disappear. Those inequalities remain when we examine online reading, too.

When the researchers working on the American Time Use Survey data talked about "leisure reading," they already counted plenty of digital options: online news, articles, essays, and eBooks. The only parts of online reading they didn't count were social-media and work-related email.

So, when the study signals a drop in daily reading for pleasure over twenty years, that's after taking into account quite a lot of online reading. Which means it's not just that people are reading fewer novels; long-form articles, in-depth essays, discursive news analysis, seem all to have taken a hit.

In other words it would be false to suggest that we're reading, as a nation, as much as we used to a quarter of a century ago and that we're simply swapping out paper for pixels.

Because studies also show that, while there's plenty of quality reading online, according to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, most of us tend to wind up playing games, watching videos, doom-scrolling, and headline-skipping. And much online content is purpose-built to accommodate this kind of superficial skimming— ever shorter paragraphs, bullet points, infographics. Your phone doesn't automatically deny you the opportunity to sink deep into a long, immersive reading session, but its design undoubtedly discourages it.

…it would be false to suggest that we're reading, as a nation, as much as we used to a quarter of a century ago and that we're simply swapping out paper for pixels

Still, if we put aside the gaming, the videos, and the doom-scrolling to focus only on online reading; what do we see? When people do read online, what are they reading?

The answer is — with one significant exception that we'll look at in a minute — it's mostly news. The majority of people consume news reporting via the television and radio. But of those who prefer to read the news, most prefer to do so online.

That doesn't always mean that those people are settling down to engage deeply with long-form reportage and in-depth analysis. An article in Time magazine that tracked reading behavior online showed that we tend to read only partially and prefer to skim the surface to "get the gist" rather than dig in and read critically.

Most visitors to online properties spend only a few seconds on a given page. A majority never scroll to the bottom of a typical blog post, for example, and a large proportion of "reading" is really skimming: glancing at headlines, scanning first paragraphs, clocking the bullet list, and then clicking away.

If you've read this far — and read every word — you are an exceptional online reader.

And talking of exceptional online readers, what do you know about the world of fanfic and user-written web serials? If we're looking for people who read a lot and obsessively for hours at a time, it's not the New York Times bestseller list or the Pulitzer Prize to which we should look. We need to turn our attention to sites like Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, Royal Road, Inkitt, Tapas, Webnovel and the rest.

These sites — where users write and publish fiction based on pre-existing franchises and characters or original fiction in serial form — attract millions of readers.

Wattpad alone has over 90 million subscribers, many of them teenagers and young adults, happily devouring stories that are often as long and convoluted as Victorian triple-deckers. Some of these web serials are three, four, even ten times the length of an average commercial novel. Readers hang on every word and eagerly anticipate the next instalments in their favorite series.

Some of the comments read like essays themselves, and the most popular writers build real fan communities who engage in lively conversations about the plots and characters.

These sites — where users write and publish fiction based on pre-existing franchises and characters or original fiction in serial form — attract millions of readers

Now, while some snobbish literary folk may sneer at all the exciting adventure and romance that these young readers consume on these sites, they might want to put their prejudices aside if they really care about literacy and the young. A very enlightening study published in the International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development found that this kind of reading supports language learning and literacy very effectively. And this is probably exactly because it's voluntary, socially engaging, and highly targeted to the demographic's needs and concerns.

So, hidden from the view of most "serious" readers of mainstream fiction, there's a whole world of avid long-form reading going on among exactly the demographic that supposedly "doesn't read": teenagers and young adults. Many of these stories also provide representation for underserved communities, such as queer kids and young people from minority groups. These sites support grassroots, user-generated, literary culture that performs a similar function to that which cheap "pulp fiction" paperbacks did back in the 1950s.

But it's still a culture that presupposes a certain socio-economic status and level of education. You need enough reading fluency to handle long chapters, of which the most highly promoted by platforms such as Wattpad are curated and edited to a professional level; you also need enough emotional bandwidth to get invested in a thousand-page story; and enough leisure to read for hours at a time. Not to mention access to suitable devices and a reliable internet connection.

The world of fanfic and web serials highlights that there's a huge reading population among millennials and Gen Z that doesn't necessarily show up in Publishers Weekly or The New York Times. So it's not defensible to say that "nobody reads anymore". But it doesn't refute the class divide and inequality of access.

So then, is reading dead? No, is the simple answer. But once you start looking at who reads and who doesn't — online or off — and the factors that determine reading habits, you see the same old inequalities of access, opportunity, education, and resources.

It's all too easy, from the standpoint of privilege, to assume that everyone has a phone these days and that the phone can be used as a portable library. It's altogether another thing to live in a household where the only internet-enabled device is a cracked phone with a prepaid data plan that runs out halfway through the month. Or to live in a rural area with a patchy signal and no room of your own. Or to share a small flat with three generations of your family and a television set that's never switched off.

The ability to read long, complex texts, online or off, also takes education and training. Especially if you need to manage distractions, evaluate sources, use search engines and chatbots intelligently, and resist the quick dopamine fix offered by the pop-up viral video clip and stay focused on a demanding piece.

But once you start looking at who reads and who doesn't — online or off — and the factors that determine reading habits, you see the same old inequalities of access, opportunity, education, and resources

Middle-class kids are much more likely to be explicitly taught those skills — at school, at home, or through simple osmosis because their parents and older siblings visibly engage in concentrated reading. It's an unhappy truth that working-class kids are more likely to be told to "get off that thing" without anyone showing them how to use "that thing" for anything except emotional avoidance.

If you finish a ten-hour shift on your feet, commute home, cook for the kids, care for your elderly relatives, and struggle to make ends meet, the last thing you have is an abundant surplus of time and attention. When you finally collapse with your phone, the path of least resistance is what appeals; and that's not a 2,000-word political analysis, a 100,000-word novel, or a 300,000-word web serial. It's a TV show or a funny video. Or it's the mindless relief of scrolling through your social media.

It's people like me — and maybe you — with a comfortable home, a steady salary, and free time in the evenings and at weekends who subscribe to Medium and Substack newsletters, read long essays in The Globe, The Guardian, and The New Yorker, and happily lose an evening to the latest prize-winning literary masterpiece.

I can guess that you have an active reading life, whether that's online, offline, or a mix of both. But I wonder if it's always been easy for you or if you've had to work hard to carve out time for reading in your daily routine? Maybe it's still a struggle. I guess it all depends on your circumstances, background, and priorities. Still, whatever those are, they may in part be shaped by your own decisions, but they will undoubtedly also be shaped by structural influences over which you have no say.

A significant and market-supporting minority of people — often the already-advantaged — are doing more deep reading than ever, delighting in a world where there's always another newsletter, another novel, or another essay to love.

A much larger group is doing little or no reading because the same structural forces — lower expectations, lack of opportunities and resources, time poverty, and high stress — that make printed books scarce in their lives make deep digital reading more difficult, too.

The so-called reading crisis, then, isn't, as several commenters on my library story claimed, that "nobody is reading anymore." It's that the right to read is increasingly a luxury for the few, whether those words are printed between book covers or lit up on a screen.

So, whatever it is that we call 'the reading crisis' has little or nothing to do with smartphones, the Internet, or building better habits and self-discipline. It has everything to do with the structural inequalities and class divisions that are built into our capitalist model of society. What, then, can we do to make the benefits of books and reading more accessible to everyone and more evenly distributed across the nation?

I don't have a simple or easy answer to that question, I'm afraid. But I can identify a few practical ways that we as normal citizens can help, especially folks like me — and maybe you — who are already inside the "readers' circle." If we have a bit of spare time and a stable income, there's a lot we can do to share and support the love of reading.

First and foremost is to read to children. They don't need to be our own! Schools, places of worship, and libraries often host a children's story hour (if your local school or library doesn't, you can suggest it). And they usually welcome volunteer readers and supporters with open arms.

We can donate some of our disposable income to help fund and support community education initiatives, school libraries, and adult reading programs. And if we find ourselves in the position to hire or manage, we can make sure people aren't working such long hours and for such miserable wages that they never get to lie on the sofa with a book. Potentially, we can even introduce a mini-library into the workplace.

And then, of course, we can write to our representatives to express the importance of reading education for an equitable and civilized society. We can vote for public libraries, school libraries, adult literacy programs, and early-years reading support for disadvantaged families.

And for ourselves, we can at least treat reading as something more than a private hobby or a guilty pleasure. We can put it together with good nutrition, exercise, and sleep hygiene; a basic condition of a healthy, liveable life, not an optional treat for the rare occasions we have nothing else to do.

I don't pretend to know what the deeper long-term solutions might be (although a literate President who gives a damn would be a good start). But so long as we keep saying that "nobody reads anymore" and explain that as some kind of inevitable consequence of technological advancement and young people's lack of interest (neither of which notions are supported by the evidence, as we've seen) then we'll keep missing the real problems we need to solve.

If you got to this sentence by reading all the sentences that went before without just scrolling past, then you are living proof that reading isn't dead. You can highlight it to let me know!

Beyond that, I'm curious about your experience. What has helped you to keep a reading habit going — especially if you don't have the money, the space, or the schedule to make it easy? What have you seen work in your family, your school, or your town to support reading, especially in the young?

Resources that make it easy for us to help support literacy and reading in the US and around the world:

RIF (Reading Is Fundamental) is one of the oldest and largest US nonprofits dedicated to children's literacy. They work with schools and community groups to get free books and literacy resources to kids who might not otherwise have them, and they run programs that spark "reading for joy," not just for tests.

Reading Partners works with Title I elementary schools across the US, turning unused classrooms into reading centers and pairing K–4 students who are behind in reading with trained volunteer tutors for one-on-one sessions.

ProLiteracy Worldwide is an international nonprofit that supports adult literacy programs. In the US, they represent around 1,000 community-based literacy and adult basic education programs; globally, they partner with organizations in dozens of countries. They focus on training educators, providing teaching materials, and advocating for adult literacy.

Support for any of these organizations — and there are many more — can mean a one-off or regular donation, resource-sharing and advocacy, or active volunteering on the ground. Let's share the love of reading!