Reading For Fun Is Plummeting In the US, and Experts Are Concerned (sciencealert.com)
- Reference: 0178899380
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/27/233214/reading-for-fun-is-plummeting-in-the-us-and-experts-are-concerned
- Source link: https://www.sciencealert.com/reading-for-fun-is-plummeting-in-the-us-and-experts-are-concerned
> When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is [2]becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S. , which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services. The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults.
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> "This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," [3]says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average.
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> Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible."
The findings have been [4]published in the journal iScience .
[1] https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right
[2] https://www.sciencealert.com/reading-for-fun-is-plummeting-in-the-us-and-experts-are-concerned
[3] https://phys.org/news/2025-08-pleasure-freefall-decades.html
[4] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113288
I've got just three words for you... (Score:2)
"Dungeon Crawler Carl"
Now get out there and Read Read Read.
reading all day (Score:2)
You are reading this right now. Many adults sit at a computer all day and we read the screen all day. Should the majority of my waking hours be about reading?
Re: reading all day (Score:2)
Came here to say this.
Though, I suppose with the gen z and gen alpha types, the majority probably just watch tik toks and play Fortnite.
Re: (Score:3)
There's a difference, I think, between reading a book and reading on social media (or even short articles). I read Slashdot, and stuff on Reddit, but it's short and bursts of random knowledge (heck, as we all know, most people just read a headline and comments, not even an actual article). None of that reading truly engages my brain, but it does put it in a hyperactive mode as I jump from comment to comment, topic to topic. However, reading a fiction novel seems to both slow down and focus my brain.
Is a d
Re: (Score:2)
You can tell when you are talking to someone if they are readers or not. It's vocab, conversant on many topics, and (mostly) full sentences. I think what ruins this is that every kids hates school, and school is always about reading (unfortunately the reading list is dumbest shit imaginable.) Kids learn to hate reading because they were scolded for not doing it by so many adults in their life.
Re: (Score:2)
I was very sad when I first noticed Amazon reviews of books with reader comments such as, "Too many long words", "Old-fashioned language", etc. Try reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", or anything by Dr Johnson, or even light reading like Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope. Some people nowadays would find Mark Twain too heavy and complicated.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd have to RTFA - which I don't care sufficiently to waste time on - to inspect the details of the questions asked, but that would be one of the things I'd design the questionnaire to illuminate. Maybe, mixing straight questions with ones about "here is a scenario ... and some questions" and mixing scenarios between respondents so that different individuals are tested for orthogonal questions.
Complex. But that's Experimental Design for you. When I studied Stats, it was a major sub-domain.
Patience (Score:2)
Old guy here. I was surprised when I noticed I no longer have the patience to read a book. I have fond memories of reading books when I was a kid. Guess I will put it on my retirement bucket list. Sad.
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There is definitely a leisure time component.
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This. YouTube has conditioned me to crave dopamine in 12 minute rushes. Even worse for kids these days who are addicted to tiktok and youtube shorts. Their attention span is measured in seconds. Still worse, they think its okay to film everything in portrait mode.
TLDR (Score:2)
TLDR is a slashdot synopsis of the issues. If satisfaction can't be achieved in 10 seconds (via text, AI summary, meme, or other quick sound byte), the younger generation seems to move on hoping for something else to tickle their fancy.
There's nothing like a good well written book. But books by modern authors frequently have many typos or wrong words or other issues. You can't even hire proofreaders or good editors anymore, evidently.
It's tough to read a book a day. I managed that one year - a bit over 88
Re: (Score:2)
A /. Reader focused on right wing drivel? Omg!
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> Mark Twain's comment "A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read." is still true today.
That's probably Twain quoting Voltaire. It has the "Voltaire" acidity.
One of these days I'll actually have to read some Twain, beyond the expurgated kiddies books, that is. The number of times I've read references to the "Connetticut [Connecticut even!] Yankee at the Court of King Arthur", I really should read it. But when it comes to enthusiasm, I've never even looked to see if there is any Twain at
Re: (Score:2)
Climbing a molehill may give you a tiny dopamine bump. But climbing a real hill, or even a mountain, will give you feelings you can't get otherwise.
Nietzsche was right when he recommended walking in the mountains. Nowadays that takes willpower, organisation, and persistence.
Still, it's worth it.
Audiobooks (Score:2)
Audiobooks and a significant library inventory boost of titles were a game-changer for me in the last 10 years. I listen to a couple books a month when I'm driving, or doing anything around the house. I have shit to do, and can't always sit down and just do that.
Sometimes when working if it doesn't require writing. It would be expensive without the library - although if I really want a particular title I'll reactivate Audible. I wonder if the study counted listeners?
Also I'd be interested to see a gender b
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That too, would be one of the things I'd look to address in designing the experiment.
I guess there's always TFA to read, if you want to know.
yet another self-reporting survey (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah this is reliable data on which to formulate recommendations, etc. -- NOT! Why didn't they look at retail book sales (online and on-premise)? Why didn't they look at library stats? Because both of these sources of actual access to books would take a lot of work to get.
Re: (Score:2)
Funding for libraries has been cut. [1]https://www.edweek.org/policy-... [edweek.org]
[1] https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/trump-admin-cuts-library-funding-what-it-means-for-students/2025/03
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Some, at least, of the authors are already working across an ocean and in a foreign jurisdiction. Do you want to make it more complicated.
I'm wondering why the London-based researchers used US people as lab-rats. Cheaper? Fewer regulatory hoops to back-flip through. Maybe doing such a study on UK students would be just illegal, or illegal to share their data with foreign researchers. Maybe that's next year's publication, with other countries to follow - wouldn't be the first multi-country study to release d
I mean it's not a lot of work (Score:2)
You can get sales figures for bookstores from their SEC filings. a quick Google shows library traffic is easy to find too and it's been declining. I don't think I need to remind everyone to State a bookstores in America.
Don't think it's that it was them being lazy I think it's that the stuff you are talking about is already known so they wanted to do a proper survey.
There is nothing wrong with a self-reporting survey as long as your data set is large enough and representative enough. I haven't read
Public Education (Score:2)
For decades, kids have been told by teachers in public education that they aren't reading the right books, they aren't reading the right way. Teachers are more concerned with improving their test scores than encouraging kids to read for fun; those kids have now grown up and graduated. People who read for fun generally do so despite the teachers rather than because of them. Mix in that COVID taught kids and parents that school wasn't all that important, the rise in AI-generated books, and you have a perfect
it's all propaganda anyway (Score:2)
I stopped reading new releases because it's all propaganda. The publishing houses are very tightly controlling what makes it to press, and if it doesn't conform to a certain set of opinions, it never sees the light of day. So, since I refuse to be propagandized, I just won't read their stuff. Same goes with movies and television.
The current book I'm reading Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, was published in 1907. Amazing how much good stuff is in the public domain now.
Re: (Score:3)
Being a conservative must be mentally exhausting. So many hurdles and mental gymnastics you go through daily. I had to listen to this whole big explanation about separating the art from the artist from a Trumper because all the live bands he sees contradict his beliefs.
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Finding out about Wagner will be mentally exhausting for you.
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Nah. It's pretty easy. Truth is Truth, no matter what. Now the other side, I can totally see how that would be mentally exhausting. You need to hold two mutually conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time and believe both are true -- on so many issues.
New bookstores? (Score:2)
Why then am I hearing that new bookstores are opening in many areas of the country? I have to question the objectivity of this survey. Perhaps they should compare this survey with a survey of bookstore sales, and bookstore openings. I would guess there would be a discrepancy!
Is it really? (Score:3)
I'm considering all the time Abraham Lincoln spent reading in his youth (one of the more documented examples of his time). That was offset by splitting fence rails, tending livestock. and generally getting done all the things that pre-industrial life required on a daily basis. Even as one famous for his bookishness, Abe spent very little of his day consuming media, for fun or otherwise.
Compare that to the amount of time spent on media consumption today. Seriously?!?
I think the main complaint here is that "books" are not being read, ignoring all other forms of media. That's fine, I prefer reading to watching myself. I read hundreds of actual books a year, and have for decades. Almost all are for fun, and the form nowadays is almost always an ebook.
While I do agree with Mark Twain ("A person who does not read has no advantage over one who cannot read"), I would substitute "learn". Whether learning from a well-researched and written book (fiction or non), or from an artfully-crafted entertainment video or documentary, learning should be the result.
Yes, most "content" is garbage. We get what we ask for, after all. If you doubt that, create a new online persona that inquires only about classical literature, and see what kind of suggestions populate your news feeds.
Reading for Fun? Absolutely my preference. But then, I never got hooked on TikTok. Crack either, for that matter, as though there were a difference.
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> Yes, most "content" is garbage. We get what we ask for, after all. If
In terms of non-trivial content (i.e. stuff published for profit, by corporations with reporting chains) "we" get what focus-group panels tell their interviewers they want. And with these things being expensive, the focus groups chosen are going to be cheap (so, local to "Head Office" ; and as small as statistically possible) and quick.
Many people blame statistics for the misuse of statistics by people who try to answer questions on the ch
People are working more (Score:2)
Especially kids. My kid had orders of magnitude more homework than I did. And when they went to college it was just nuts.
businesses don't want to train and they have deep pockets so they went to the government and they took over the school boards and they changed things. They basically added a ton of on the job style training to college education.
They didn't want to pay for that at the high school level so they just heaped on tons of homework.
I've said this before but when my kid was in high scho
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> I've said this before but when my kid was in high school it was not uncommon for me to get up to go piss at midnight and find them still doing homework.
Yes, working until 02:00 or 03:00 in the morning was fairly normal. That was in the 1970s. I don't know what is considered normal now. Probably more.
Mind you, I didn't normally start until about 21:00 - family meal (when Mum wasn't on evening shift), a bit of TV time. Then up to my bedroom to get on with the homework. Get back from the library after school a
No, they aren't reading books for fun. (Score:2)
For example, I'm reading Slashdot and the comments mostly for fun. I'd suggest that maybe people are still reading for fun, they're just reading other sorts of things, mainly on their phones.
Doom reading, A Geeks Reading List (Score:2)
After reading the 20 poltical blogs, 15 news blogs, 10 technology blogs, and 4 dealing with enterprise culture while consuming 10 to 30 videos on everything from RC aircraft to 3d printing at the same time, reading about made up charaters is a no go taking out fiction. Then go to the legal blogs around copyrights. Non fiction reading is more history of very specific technologies. There just are not alot of books in the relm of Richard Rhodes and Ben Rich or as unkown directly on the internet as the los
Comic books were a gateway to reading (Score:2)
I was never big on reading books when I was a kid in the 80s but back then at least when we did not have tablets and smartphones, we only had the TV and video games which was not mobile I think I need to point out as that meant we needed to consume other things in our rooms or on the bus to school. So we also had a lot of comic books sold all around and I was an avid reader of those. It may not have been as good as reading books but I credit it for my ability to read and write English as it is not my main l
Do they count kindle? (Score:2)
Get your kid a kindle unlimited subscription. Books may not be the top1%, but they are good and can inspire a love for reading for cheap.
Also, to those naming good books, try:
The Vorkosogian books by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Re: (Score:2)
"For the purposes of the study, it was considered reading for pleasure if participants read a book, magazine, newspaper, or e-reader, or listened to an audiobook, for their own personal interest."
So Kindles count as reading. Reading a paper newspaper or magazine counts, but I'm guessing that reading the same thing on a screen doesn't count. Reading a bound encyclopedia counts, but reading Wikipedia doesn't.
So, for this study, reading only counts as reading if it was in one of the chosen forms. The word "ple
illiteracy is good for voice input, I mean busines (Score:2)
Who was it? Microsoft? Google?
Announced new product last week, voice input to their LLM.
You are encouraged to be illiterate. It's going to be good for business.
You are aiming for only one book (Score:2)
and it's not exactly a riveting read,
more widesread? (Score:2)
To be honest, I'm seeing this in other countries. I was an avid reader of fiction, philosophy and technology. Now days it's all on the internet, except fiction, which is on audible. Poor eyesight (I'm 60) pushed me in that direction.
I'm more sad about not writing as much as I did, with pen and paper.
Reading is boring. (Score:2)
I mean, look at it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading%2C_Pennsylvania
How could this be (guilty) (Score:3)
a) 21% of the US is functionally illiterate.
26% cannot read at 10th grade level
b) I've been reading for over 10 years that most Americans don't read three books a year.
c) Guilty - between myself, my wife, our kids and grandkids, thousands of Americans don't read a book a year (to lower the average that we skew).
Dopamine tolerance is a global epidemic (Score:3)
Engagement farming doesn't merely sell advertisement.
It habituates cognition to a higher base level of engagement-stimulus, and THAT part works regardless of whether you eventually click through or buy a product. Simply seeing a clickbait headline stimulates the brain even if your higher-level critical thinking recognizes the bait and reminds you not to click the link. Your reaction of eyeroll, disdain, disgust, annoyance as you scroll past it is still a state of neuro-endocrine excitement . And every public and private experience is now being reshaped around engagement.
You simply cannot sustain that throughout entire narratives in long-form novels. If everything is the most important thing, then no thing is important. Narratives need dynamic range. The longer the narrative, the larger the range.
The movie "Run, Lola, Run" was a deliberate exercise in maintaining the constant tension of narrative excitement. But even that film only worked because it was an outlier within a storytelling medium with a wide range of immediacy levels. if every film was at that same intensity, the collective audience would become less interested in film as a medium, even if they couldn't explicitly explain why. It's why narrative arcs like the MCU can't perpetually dominate the field. You can only escalate the "existential threat to the country planet galaxy universe" so far before you escalate yourself into a corner.
You either have to balance the excitement with tedious characterization backstory or throwaway "monster of the week" episodes to preserve the value of the single long-form payoff, or you have to abandon the single long format buildup and shift toward a series of constant lower-level hits which must necessarily be kept short and narratively isolated from each other to preserve their punch.
In this unacknowledged global epidemic of tech-caused dopamine tolerance, we have chosen the latter.
The activity hasn't changed, but the functional payoff of the activity has. It's not that people are reading less, it's that what they are reading is less durable. It has to be, in order to maintain the stim level of each short snippet.
The article says "reading for fun is plummeting". Well, when people scroll 8,000 words on their socials, are they not reading for fun? I'll answer my own question -- no, we are not, because our cognition is being reprogrammed on a massive scale. The nature of "fun" has changed from more of a satisfaction-completion model to a stimulation-maintenance model. Ask yourself whether you ever feel satisfied or fulfilled at the end of the night after interstitially side-scrolling your feeds for two hours. Have you finished it? Do you ever get to any sort of end of the feed and feel that "Ahhhh.... now I see how it all came together" cognitive payoff you used to get from finishing a novel? Even when you stop scrolling, is it because you have reached fulfillment and enrichment, or is it simply because the time has come to force yourself to darken the screen and go to sleep just so you can make it through another day of work?
Stories like this one always result in people upping initiatives to push books on kids, as if access to books is still as rare and challenging and elitist as it was in 1897. In fact, the supply/access to books in 2025 is so pervasive that the monetary value of individual books is approaching zero. Which is why we now have hundreds of thousands of people with a "Little Free Library" in their front yard or church lawn or local park where they literally give millions of books away for free to anyone who wants one.
But access is not the cause of this story. If "reading for fun" is plummeting, it isn't because people are having a hard time finding books, it's because people are having a hard time reading books, because it simply isn't fun anymore. The cognitive nature of "fun" has changed, so when our brains are looking around the local environment for sources of "fun", the "fun" provided by long-form readin
[1]Read the rest of this comment...
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23780802&cid=65621508
Reading is obsolete (Score:2)
Especially when you can watch 4 minute video clips of influencers on your phone. In all seriousness, if a EMP went off it would do the world a tremendous service
Also a Real Estate Problem (Score:2)
In the US, some people in power see libraries as a waste of money and land because use is generally in decline. In my neck of the woods, a library and community center are being replace with business zoned or mixed use properties, because someone gets to make money moving the public resources elsewhere. Fortunately, the replacements are already constructed and slated to open very soon, but that's only because it's an affluent suburb.
Reading for fun, or Reading Books for fun? (Score:2)
I mean, we're all reading this article, or at least TFS. Okay, I'll fess up. I only read the title.
Last book I enjoy? (Score:2)
A few years back, I read a good book on Freemasonry, that my mother-in-law bought me for Christmas. Before that, I don't know, I think it was a different Freemasonry book my mother bought me, but if I add up all the books I've enjoyed reading, it's under 10, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was under 7. That total includes everything I remember reading from grade 1, until now, and the reason? Most books are boring, and long, and if I have a couple of hours to spend doing nothing, why invest that into t
Why Worried? (Score:2)
This is what they want isnt it ?
A bunch of subservient plebs to rule over who dont ask questions and just accept their lot in life?
When I read a book (Score:1)
I read about one book per year + research papers.
One month ago I read a steampunk book.
Not surprised (Score:3, Insightful)
Anti intellectualism will do that. Look who runs the department of education for an example.
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? You don't think defunding libraries, demonizing librarians, banning books and ridiculing authors as "elites" discourages people from reading for fun?
Re: (Score:2)
No. Especially since those are all generalization fallacies.
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> ... all generalization fallacies
Strongly promoted by America's PR department. If that is how America's government want their population to be perceived, well their wish is granted.
The interesting thing, to me, is that from TFS, the work was carried out on lab animals form Florida, but at least some of the work (experimental design, statistical analysis ... ? I'd have to care enough to RTFA) and a significant part of the credit is done by researchers in London.
If a tree falls in the forest, and all the press
Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
He didn't blame it on the Department or the current administration. Other way round: There is a long standing trend of anti-intellectualism, and only in that climate (and in a visionary movie like Idiocraty) would such offices be given to Pro-Wrestlers.
But that whole thing started way longer.
Re: (Score:1)
Well least we don't have cage fighting at the White House. Oh wait. Never mind.
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't been paying attention to the Transpondian News. Is this how Trump is selecting cabinet members today, instead of squeezing the hooters and checking if she spits or swallows?
Is there mud? And un-peeled bananas?
Yet?
Re: (Score:2)
I think that damage is going to be something we see down the track. The kids who are getting their educations fucked up now because steaming goons are burning books and banning anything that doesnt look like an 1800s schoolmaster screaming at kids to do their 3xRs.. We'll see that damage in 10-15 years.
Whats happening now I think has a lot to do with the damage we're doing to our cognitive 00executive functioning by being glued to screens all day. There *might* be other things but this one seems obvious.
I u
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> Anti intellectualism will do that. Look who runs the department of education for an example.
The Leave No Moron Behind policies that reduced the American classroom down to the lowest dumbnominator, didn’t fall off the back of the DoE truck yesterday. Neither did turning the entire American education system into a liberal cesspool of political indoctrination. Let’s try and remember that before we assume a single administration or political party is to blame.
Greed infected education. We fucked the kids and their future when we started tying dollars to grades.
Anti-intellectualism, hedonism, or ressentiment? (Score:3)
The classic work on anti-intellectualism could be [1] The Closing of the American Mind [worldcat.org] but warnings have been ringing out for centuries, even before [2] Buck v. Bell [justia.com], that our species was in decline. Guys like [3]Francis Galton [galton.org] warned us that [4] Idiocracy [criticker.com] was inbound because as the Victoria Era faded, it was clear that some kind of serious decline had set in. The eugenicsts said we were getting physically dumber; Bloom and friends argue that our political need for easy answers led us to partial truths and what Mich
[1] https://search.worldcat.org/title/17820784
[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/274/200/
[3] https://galton.org/
[4] https://www.criticker.com/film/Idiocracy/
Re: (Score:2)
"At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future" by Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie.
We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by
Re: (Score:2)
> we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest
I have not seen any rigorous, scientific evidence that "smarter" children were more likely to survive than "dumber" children. You can be "smart" and still die just as easily from the same things that killed most children throughout history - smallpox, the plague and various other infectious diseases (such as measles), diarrhea diseases, malaria, a serious infection from a paper cut, not enough food, and war / conflict.
And even IF there was "selection" for smarter people, it would take thousands and thousa