46% of Americans didn't read a book in 2023
nathanbransford.com
nathanbransford.com
And that also links to the real data.
Toplines: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines...
Crosstabs: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor...
49% of Americans read at least 2 books.
From page 124, the 4 indicators that you probably read a book are Race (white), Income (100k+), Voter registration status (registered), and party/ideology (not a centrist).
Have you tried before spending your whole day at your computer?
I also found myself having a lot less time to read after having a child. I've only started again this year because I feel like doomscrolling in bed is not the best way to fall asleep.
Between work and kids it just has to go. I am also blessed with no sleeping problems which means that I fall asleep the moment i go to bed. I try to read at least one book per year during vacation.
I read so much when I was younger.
I am not certain I will get the habit back when I get older.
Can't say I miss it, either.
Reading a book at this stage in my life (busy with kids) feels self-indulgent and selfish.
I try to read some of the books my kids read, allows me to connect with them. They love talking about their books.
N.B. This stat appears to pertain to English language literacy, not literacy per se. Some of those 18%ers might be reading Dante in the original Italian or Shakespeare in the original Klingon.
citation needed
These days I'll often read a book or two on vacation, but not always.
I've actively come back to this way of reading books the last 15 years, the key is to make it easy to read books and not having any notifications.
This is a perennial observation about general illiteracy in the US but who was even alive when this wasn’t the case? lol
Fahrenheit 451 is a 70 year old book complaining about this exact problem.
There are multiple history podcasts, some of which are made by actual historians, which go for hundreds of episodes. It might not be "reading a book" but I really fail to see the big difference between that and an audiobook. Except that it's cheaper/easier/better than using Audiobooks.
I listen to lectures about health from doctors. Casually listening to a lecture simply wasn't something you could just do not so long ago. Is listening to a 2 hour lecture summarising information about a health topic I'm interested in worse than reading books?
I now have access to medical papers which used to be gate-kept by Elsevier with the complicity of higher education. Nowadays it seems like the vast majority of research papers are publicly accessible. Is reading scientific papers worse than reading books?
Maybe I should be paying Audible a subscription fee so that people think I'm erudite though. I don't think there's anything wrong with books but people fetishise them.
Whoa nellie.
If you chose not to read books yes it is worse. There are many books you can read that will give you a massive amount of information about a subject, not only hard facts but soft philosophical issues. I've experienced The Trail by Kafka as radio/play/movie/book, it is amazingly good as a book.
I do not care if you do not think the same or if you can not experience the same thing as I can when I read books. I do not want you to deprive others of that feeling though.
A lot of times I'll hear an hour podcast with the author of a book summarizing some parts of it, but when I read the book itself it includes a lot more detail, hard data, etc.
Some podcasts are well researched but many others feel very conversational and not as well fact checked.
First, I reject the premise that audiobooks count as reading. We can agree it's consuming a book, or listening to one, but it's pretty objectively not reading.
This is important to my next point too: reading is important not only for expanding ones horizons, but for learning spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and forming long-form arguments. Some of these can be picked up from listening, but certainly not all.
And because we communicate so much by text in the modern world, spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure can have an outsized impact on your life and social interactions
For (some of) the specific points you're making here, you're right that reading is not the same as listening to an audiobook - you're not learning spelling and punctuation. I don't think that's true of grammar, sentence structure, etc, but ok.
However I push back strongly on the idea that, in general, "audiobooks don't count as reading" in other respects. It's drawing a completely artificial distinction between different modes of consuming information, almost always for the purposes of "gatekeeping" or making one thing seem "less" than the other.
The purpose of reading is mostly to get information and/or a story, "expanding one's horizons" as you put it. This is equally achieved via either physically reading or via listening to someone read the story to you. To the extent that we think reading books is a worthwhile endeavor, 90% of what you get is gotten via audiobooks as much as via physically reading.
> And because we communicate so much by text in the modern world, spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure can have an outsized impact on your life and social interactions
We also communicate a lot by spoken language.
Watching movies, listening to 2h conference talks, playing a 60h narrative videogame, and reading scientific papers in PDF may not be as noble, but they are equally meaningful to me.
I'd love to hear of one that was though.
Mainstream gaming is still getting there, but to me titles like The Last of Us Part 2 are on par with classic HBO shows like Six Feet Under.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is one great artistic work. If you haven't played it, you haven't experienced the peak of a massive wildly recognized medium. Last of Us (the show) was essentially copied verbatim from the video game, scene for scene.
On the entire opposite side of the complexity spectrum, both Limbo and Inside are great artistic works.
What makes LotR a "great artistic work"? What makes Stardew Valley not a "great artistic work"?
Just like some books, films, or other art can resonate and have a profound impact on a person, so can video games.
That's a great question. It's a mixture of technical skill and intellectual depth.
For example, throughout Scotland placenames are a mixture of old Gaelic, modern Gaelic and Norse, and then there are the Anglicised versions on top. So learning what placenames mean is something I did in school and it's a fascinating subject.
So when Gildor is talking with Frodo, and mentions the "...Branduin, that you call the Brandywine..." (quote from memory; might not be correct), that's exactly what happens with placenames. It's that level of depth (in all aspects, this is just an example) that makes it a great work. You can read more on just the name of a river at https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Baranduin
Enjoyment of art is, as you say, totally subjective, but anyone who's artistic can generally identify when something is a great work even if they don't personally like it.
Edit: if you like this kind of stuff, there are also some cool blog posts on the logistics of the Battle of Gonder: https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondo...
As literature goes it has tons of shortcomings.
Tell me I'm wrong.
There is no music that compares to "War and peace" or paintings like "1984", nor is the movie "Alien" like any book. Describing H R Gigers monster design with words will not have the same artistic impact.
I think different creations can be be great artistic works on entirely incomparable axes.
The modern stuff feels like total fluff compared to a book, which in turn feel like total fluff compared to the academic papers it is based on. These days I would rather spend 2 hours reading a good book or paper than 10 minutes watching an engagement-optimized edutainment video.
And for the really good stuff you have to go even more legacy – conversation with an expert. A medium older even than books. That’s where you get the stuff that hasn’t made it into papers yet, let alone the downstream half-digested edutainment stuff.
Yep, it appears that the deepest format we have today is long-form hypertext. Often containing a few 10min videos itself.
Some people do equate those with books, but it's far from unanimous.
Lots of surface level books that are the length of a book and the value of a 5min tiktok too.
For anyone who wants to get back into reading books my advice is to start with whatever sounds fun. A lot of people fall into a trap of feeling like they need to read something useful or serious and just get turned off to the idea. But reading lighter books are still great and provide a lot that you won't get from tv and similar mediums. Over time your interests will evolve naturally into new areas.
Modern 8 to 10 episode series can get close to being as nuanced as a good book. You simply need space to go deep, no amount of cleverness will help you do that in a short format.
Maybe generative AI will get to the point where a single author can create a comic, movie or game with similar depths as that of books but it hasn't yet.
If you enjoy reading that's one thing but there's not much point otherwise.
Reading a summary of the book in Wikipedia/Blinkist/ChatGPT is definitely not the same as the reading book.
Sure, you may grasp at the central idea or argument superficially, but to understand it fully, with its caveats and nuances, and overarching context?
You can regurgitate but not assimilate.
You're putting way too much faith into people's intelligence (or projecting your own onto them) if you think people are picking up the nuanced bits just by reading.
Which still to the thread starts point. All of that stuff could be captured in a diff medium and to my point if it's worth capturing in the first place can be summarized and the additional stuff you're mentioning written as bullet points.
Of course no one - no matter how intelligent! - will pick up every bit of nuance. That's why engaging with what other people think (also a process!) about [whatever] is an important part of skill development. I don't think anyone is incapable of engaging in this - even if their sophistication will always be limited by their intelligence / affinity / time / etc etc etc.
This is a useful paradigm under which to consider other skills. Computer code (product) is (approaching...) wide availability from LLMs, but the skills necessary to be a good developer come through a process that involves independently solving problems and asking questions that have (at least at first!) already been addressed by others.
Hardly it almost always a shortened more approachable summary of something described in a book. Also (IMHO) videos are a horrible format for transferring knowledge, it’s slow AF compared to reading and impossible to search, you have to consume it mostly sequentially
Sure, you could buy a book about snes (not even sure if any good ones exist) and read about that... but you're not that interested into the topic, because it's something old and not something you'll actually do... but here's a 6 minute video, that you'll probably watch... and if it's interesting, you'll go down a playlist and see "how thing were done" "back then" and learn something new.
Ever heard of Tefifon music player? Neither have I, until i saw the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqfVS6ahArs ... i would have never bought a book on ancient music players, but I learned something new by watching a short video.
Ever heard of purple gold? Neither have I, again, until the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Pcp944sRI
Compare this to eg. book bestsellers: https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/combined-print-an...
Sometimes all you need is a summary, you're not a chemist, SNES programmer or an old music player collector, but you still learn a lot, and all those things are topics, where you just don't buy a book, because th 10, 20 minute video covers all that you need and want to know.
Certainly. However a text summary is still much more efficient (unless you’re watching the video mainly for entertainment).
A few centuries ago, the illiteracy rate was way higher. But it’s always been mostly been niche activity for intelligent people, that’s why the school used to focus on training that skill
Isn’t it? Weren’t people reading more books on average if we go back a decade or few?
Movies and games are fine if you're comparing to fiction and just relaxing.
As someone who does all the things, reading (even listening to audio books) feels different to me. I get more out of it.
How many people are reading scientific papers but zero books?
No one is telling you to stop watching movies or playing video games, but being a more active participant in a leisure activity can be beneficial every once in a while.
Player driven games like that are actually making the best use the medium and it's special quality of interactivity. Film-games really want to be films and are trying to awkwardly cram elements of the medium of drama into the medium of games which is really gonna hurt the end result, even if they do stellar work, they are starting from a huge disadvantage by working against their chosen medium.
It does depend heavily on the game. There are games that involve a lot of farming where I think reading a book problem results in larger brain activity.
Puzzle games like the witness engage the brain much more.
1-3% of people have aphantasia. That’s not everyone, but it’s close.
I learned history in a way that sticks much better from Europa Universalis and Total War than from books, even though those games aren't even real in the sense that you're making up a new timeline. Orbital mechanics only clicked for me when trying to land a rover on the Mun in KSP.
Maybe entertaining simulations are the second-best way to learn besides actually doing something, with books somewhere further down the line.
https://acoup.blog/2021/04/30/collections-teaching-paradox-e...
But you do learn about the situation in which different countries and historical figures found themselves and the options they had.
This is much more valuable because this type of learning has lessons for today; versus merely memorizing that king such-and-such did this-and-that in 1523, which doesn't.
Based on recent HN threads, sounds like a large percentage of scientific papers are pure fiction. At least books on Goodreads have public reviews and a simple star rating.
Does similar exist for scientific papers?
https://retractionwatch.com is a good one to read occasionally.
> reading scientific papers in PDF, listening to 2h conference talks
is not equivalent to
> Watching movies, playing a 60h narrative videogame
There's too much that's either unsaid or can't be said in those other mediums. The mediums themselves even preclude any kind of depth due to their very nature, constraints, whether they be financial constraints, distribution, time-slot scarcity (as in a T.V. series), etc. Many seemingly educational works become vapid infotainment (TED Talks, History/Discovery networks, videogames can maybe be narrative, but the essence of it is always the gameplay).
I think his thesis was directed more at the importance of non-fiction expositions, but I feel it's just as applicable to works of fiction, which are oftentimes even better at expounding important ideas, philosophies, etc. than non-fiction works.
It may be old, but calling it "legacy" implied it's an old relic we should abandon.
I'll say that the opposite is the case. We should be reading more, and do less of passive activities such as watching movies or listening to conferences (where its very easy to zone out and not get any useful transfer).
Overall I think this readers to become more reasonable people, because life is full of unreasonable things. Things we can't explain, things that seem silly, but we nevertheless have to grapple with them.
Other fiction can fulfill a similar role, but I suspect that books are better at it because they require the reader to put in more effort.
We shouldn't. We also don't, not really. Reading books has a certain prestige, but by almost any measure, we "obsess" more about movies and/or tv shows. Even some of the best selling books of all time probably have orders of magnitude less exposure than tv shows, movies or games. Not unrelatedly, far more people talk about TV shows and games, etc.
I think the only obsession is that some people consider books to be "better" in some sense. Personally, I don't think books are better, just different. I enjoy TV shows and movies as much as I enjoy books, and consider them to both be important. (I don't play many games, which I think truly is me missing out!)
Here: https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/48239-54-per...
I haven't read a book for a few years. Don't have time. I don't think it's a big deal.
[1]: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/to-the-royal-ac...
Voracious reader. Dozens of books a year, all swords & sorcery. Not really anything he could learn from.
When I am in a period when I am reading books regularly, I am generally happy. Things are going well, I have good life balance.
When I go a stretch without reading books, I am generally stressed out and in burnout mode at work, and home life is not great.
Note - this is generally fiction. I read very little non fiction.
Note 2 - most people I know have no books in evidence in their homes. Maybe they read Kindle or other ebooks? But I think many simply do not read recreationally.
Reading is, for me, a better form of pure escapism than gaming or movies.
Like going to the gym, it’s easy to go a long stretch without reading once you stop, and fall into effortless habits again.
(Yes, Britney Spears is still on the NYT list. I checked so you don't have to.)
From what I've read, this is why you never see Christian literature on the top seller lists. The Christian publishing industry is absolutely massive and would consistently dominate any objective top sellers list.
But I probably read 3 or 4 hours (or more) a day. I used to read lots of books before the internet but the internet mostly replaced it.
There are a few perspectives one can take.
Maybe (probably) attention spans, including mine, have decreased with the internet. On the other hand, many non fiction books could be summed up in pamphlet and are full of filler. It's not necessarily a badge of honor to trudge through repetition and filler for hours to grasp core concepts.
It wasn't only last year either.
EDIT: people are counting scientific journals, articles, etc. so, I'm good there, but not a book, from cover to cover, in years.
I read a lot but I can't think of a book I read last year.
I don't think "didn't read a book" is that useful for inference about imagination, literacy, education etc., unless it's also matched by watching an enormous amount of linear or episodic television.
"Didn't read a book" might, however, be a meaningful proxy for shorter attention spans. I think it could be in my case, even though I read voraciously.
Note that mystery, crime, romance and history were among the top genres. I would venture that many more Americans watch mystery, crime, romance and history shows than the 46%.
To me, this borders on trying to draw conclusions from sensationalist titles like "only 10% of all Americans listen to the town cryer for news". There are other forms of media that people use to consume information or entertainment.
[0] https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/48239-54-per...
With those caveats, I have zero difficulty absorbing an audiobook. The only thing I'd say is that the narrator's performance definitely colors your impression of the book, for better or worse or just...different.
― Albert Einstein
https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor...
The lack of reading is a symptom.
You got to adjust for shame and such. I'd bet it's up to twice as much in practice, that is 92% did not actually open a book. I'll give you that 46% do not own one, that sounds reasonable.
Are... Are they LYING?? No one lies on the internet.
EDIT: Wow I guess I hit a, nerve. Sorry folks. I use Goodreads and finish about a book a month. So I don't think a book a week is unreasonable/impossible. I just meant to allude to the fact that the platform has gotten a lot of attention for review bombing and profile manipulation.
Anyways, here is some data (not MAU, to be fair) about US stats:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/most_read?category=all&countr...
People with children are often lucky to have 30 minutes for themselves.
But more to your point, what percentage of the population do you think is active on goodreads? I can't find any MAU numbers for them, just total membership numbers. Regardless, it is a self-selecting audience. Much like if you go to a theater to see the latest garbage marvel movie, the people in that theater are probably very likely to have seen other marvel movies in the theater recently too.
a. the original poll this article is based on says that 1% of the US population reads 50+ books a week; 1% of 3.3*10^8 people is still a lot of people.
b. some books are much easier to read than others, are your friends just kicking back once a week with a competently-written potboiler in a genre they've been reading half their life, or are they reading one abstruse 800-page tome after another? Or are they reading kid's books to a child in their life?
Lying's certainly a possibility too, but so's marking something as "read" when you actually abandoned it somewhere before the end - and that's a spectrum too; when I read Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" I abandoned it about ten pages before the end but I'd still say I "read" it. If I'd only gotten ten pages in I wouldn't say that.