No, you aren’t imagining things—Americans are, in fact, reading less than they used to.
This is the inescapable conclusion of a recent study that found a 43 percent drop over the last two decades in the number of Americans who report they are reading for pleasure on a daily basis. The study, published in the online journal iScience in September, analyzed reading rates recorded in the federal government’s annual American Time Use Survey, which tracks the daily activities of more than 236,000 Americans.
Just 16 percent of those who responded to the survey in 2023 reported reading for pleasure in the past twenty-four hours, compared with 28 percent of people in the same survey two decades earlier. Reading for pleasure varies widely among different demographics, with significantly higher rates among women, those holding advanced degrees, and other forms of identity, according to the survey.
The iScience study assigns no blame for the decline in reading rates, but Jill Sonke, a University of Florida professor and a coauthor of the study, says the digital revolution almost certainly played a major part. “One of the big things is that there is so much competition for our attention, notably from digital media and from social media,” Sonke says. “The way we seek and receive information is changing. Many of us are seeking and getting information in smaller bites.”
The American Time Use Survey specifically includes listening to audiobooks and reading e-books as examples of reading for pleasure, but in its prompts to participants, it doesn’t refer to reading news or blogs online, leading the iScience researchers to question whether the survey captures all the leisure reading participants are doing.
Indeed, in the view of Lauren Groff, whose eighth book, the story collection Brawler, is forthcoming in February from Riverhead Books, what we’re seeing today may be less a decline in total reading time than a shift in how and where people read. “If you were to actually gauge how much people are reading, they’re probably reading more because they’re reading a lot on-screen,” she says. “No matter what, there are still a lot of words being read, but of course that’s not the same thing as reading books.”
Still, the apparent decline in sustained reading, which is reinforced by studies by the National Endowment for the Arts, remains a reason for concern. The NEA’s 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that the number of people who said they had read a book in the past year dropped from 54.6 percent in 2012 to 48.5 percent a decade later. The reading of novels and short stories declined even more precipitously, to the point that just less than 38 percent of those in the 2022 NEA survey said they’d read a book of fiction in the past year.
“It’s existential,” says poet Major Jackson about the decline in reading rates. “I’ve banked my whole life and belief systems around the idea that conversations, very substantive, real conversations happen in books, whether that’s a book of poems, fiction, or essays.”
Jackson, the author of six poetry collections, including most recently, Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022 (Norton, 2023), says that every year when he taught at the University of Vermont he would ask his students whether they had ever read an entire book. His students usually answered overwhelmingly in the affirmative, but, he says, “I can assure you that number dwindled from year to year.” (Jackson now teaches at Vanderbilt University.)
None of this is reason for creative writers to lose heart, asserts Denne Michele Norris, editor in chief of Electric Literature. She says the decline in reading rates won’t change her approach to her work. “There will always be readers, people who need work that takes this world seriously, that tells unheard stories, that records what is happening and what we think and feel about it,” says Norris, whose debut novel, When the Harvest Comes, was published by Random House in April 2025.
But if people are indeed reading less, what can writers—presumably voracious readers themselves and among those who stand to gain the most from higher numbers of readers—do to turn the tide? Some see new media as a potential tool for attracting readers. Jackson notes that the poetry podcast The Slowdown, which he hosted for two years, regularly logs thirty-five thousand downloads per episode. Others put their faith in programs that bring readers together either online or in person. In addition to being a best-selling novelist, Groff runs her own bookstore in Florida, The Lynx, which recently hosted Gainesville Reads. The monthlong festival, which in 2025 was built around Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection We’re Alone (Graywolf, 2024), attracted more than a thousand people to twenty separate events, Groff says.
As her decision to open a new bookstore suggests, Groff is doubling down on reading as an enduring American pastime. “I don’t have any Chicken Little disaster feelings about this because I do think people are still reading a great deal,” she says. “And no matter what, screens can’t take the place of the physical codex book, which is the most advanced technology that humans have ever come up with.”
Michael Bourne, a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, is the author of two novels, We Bring You an Hour of Darkness (DoppelHouse, 2025) and Blithedale Canyon (Regal House, 2022).
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