A General Decline in Reading

The good news in this Publishers Weekly article is scant, indeed:

Another study that takes a stab at trying to determine how much, or how little, Americans read has been released. The new report looked [at] how reading for pleasure and reading with children fared between 2003 to 2023 and found that only 16% of adults read for pleasure on a given day in 2023, the lowest rate of any year in the survey and down roughly 40% from 2003. The study also found that reading for pleasure fell about 3% annually between 2003 and 2023.

The results were based on responses from 236,270 individuals who completed the Americans Time Use Survey (ATUS) once between 2003 and 2023, excluding the Covid year of 2020. As is often the case in these studies, the authors did find some good news. The 1,747 participants who did read for pleasure in 2023 spent an average of 1 hour and 37 minutes reading per day, up from 1 hour and 23 minutes in 2003.

When adults are reading, they aren’t reading to their children that much, according to the findings. In 2023, participants spent an average of one minute per day reading with children, and only 2% read with children on a given day. But, the report noted, those small percentages did not change significantly between 2003 and 2023.

You can look over the full ATUS study results here.