Do People Even Read Anymore?

Sacher

In a world of constant distraction, it comes as no surprise that the amount of time spent reading for pleasure these days is dwindling. Jonathan Burdick takes a look at how the statistics have changed over the years and what we can do to bolster our numbers and make reading a priority.

John Adams was an enthusiastic reader. There was little that he enjoyed as much as getting lost in his books, studying, and absorbing the thoughts and ideas and stories of others. His personal library, comprising around 3,000 books, was one of the largest private collections of its time. In 1772, while away from his home, he wrote to his wife Abigail of what he missed the most. "[A]bove all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books," he told her.

As explained in David McCullough's biography, unlike many of the founders of the United States, Adams was an awkward man who dressed plainly and couldn't dance or play cards. He had no inherited fortune or family prestige. Books, he learned early on, were his key to knowledge and, as McCullough wrote, helped shape Adams into becoming a "great-hearted, persevering man of uncommon ability and force."

He was well-read in the Roman and Greek classics and in ethics and philosophy and science, but it was the tales of authors such as William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift that helped him "fathom the 'labyrinth' of human nature" and his passion for reading only grew as years passed.

Despite his love of reading though, even Adams at times felt distracted from it. As a young man, he wondered why time simply seemed to get away from him. "All my time seems to roll away unnoticed. I long to study sometimes, but have no opportunity," he wrote in his diary. "I have no books, no time, no friends. I must therefore be contented to live and die an ignorant, obscure fellow."

Fast-forward two centuries and it often remains a challenge to find the time to pick up a book and read. There's endless laundry. Dishes in the sink. A dog to walk. All those daily obligations and responsibilities. It's easy to feel guilty about what you're not getting done when you sit down with a book. As a result, many of us, like Adams, wish that we had more opportunities to read.

The idea that people don't read anymore is nothing new either. In 1980, Walter Tevis published the dystopian novel Mockingbird, a spiritual cousin to the better-known classics Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. In it, an illiterate and apathetic humanity is on the verge of extinction. It is set in New York City a few hundreds years in the future and humanity exists only to consume mind-numbing sedatives and meaningless entertainment under the watchful eye of highly advanced androids.

Humans are lazy, an administrative android tells the recently literate protagonist, Paul Bentley. People desire distractions and reading is not a distraction, but exercise for our mind's eye. Bentley pushes back, arguing that humans desire not distractions, but connection. Since learning to read, he sensed the awe of traversing other minds, even of those long dead. "All of those books – even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones – have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being," Bentley continues. "And I have learned … that I am not alone on this earth."

It's a story emphasizing ideas over plot, letting us explore the mind and philosophies of Tevis, who also authored The Hustler and The Queen's Gambit. His personal struggles with numbing his mind with alcohol served as inspiration for his story after sobering up following an eight-month bender. Of course, Mockingbird is also about literacy, inspired by his 25 years as an English teacher.

"[M]y private experience as an English teacher has been that Americans don't read books," explained Tevis. "They didn't read books in 1949 when I started teaching. They don't read books now." Some blamed television, but he said that wasn't really the problem. As Tevis portrayed in Mockingbird, he stated that people are inclined to "find substitutes for living their lives."

Of course, even in 1981 when Tevis claimed Americans don't read books, he was being hyperbolic. People do read books. As the New York Times recently reported, over 700 million print books were sold last year. Book reading is declining though and has been for some time. A widely discussed Gallup poll from 2022 found that Americans are reading an average of about a dozen books per year, down from 18.5 in 1999. A 2025 YouGov poll found something perhaps more enlightening though: about 40 percent of Americans reported reading zero books over the previous year. An average person polled read eight books while the median was two. Less than 20 percent read 10 or more.

It's easy to blame social media and, sure, there is obviously truth in that. Sometimes doomscrolling Facebook provides us the instant gratification that we crave. Why read John Steinbeck talking about some trip he took with his dog when we can watch a celebrity eat increasingly spicy chicken wings on YouTube? To be fair, Sean Evans is a great interviewer. All I know is that sometimes I plan for an evening of reading, but somehow end up clicking through Netflix for half an hour adding more movies and shows that I probably won't watch to my watchlist. Ah, the tyranny of choice.

Even if folks are reading fewer books, they're likely reading elsewhere: online articles, local news, maybe that uncle posting his long-form ramblings on social media. And it may be hard to believe, but millions of people still have print magazine subscriptions.

I would still argue that reading a book, a story with multiple threads told across hundreds of pages, is a different workout for our brains. It's also different from reading something because you have to, such as for school or work, rather than pleasure. Americans have self-reported a drastic decrease in pleasure reading. In a sweeping study of 236,000 American readers published in 2025, researchers found a 40 percent decrease in reading for pleasure over the past 20 years. Similarly in another study, 13-year-olds who read for pleasure "almost every day" has fallen by 13 percentage points over the last decade. In 1984, less than 10 percent of children reported to Pew Research Center that they "never or hardly ever" read for fun, while in 2020, that number nearly tripled for middle and high school-age students.

So, what can we do in our increasingly distracting world? For my part, I'm going to continue being deliberate in setting time aside to read for pleasure. For others who hope to do the same, carve out a reasonable amount of time or set yourself a daily goal, even if it's only 10 minutes or pages each night. Join one of the numerous book clubs hosted each month at Werner Books & Coffee (like the Erie Reader Book Club) or create your own with friends. Go to the library and peruse (only half of Americans have a library card!) or visit the Erie County Public Library virtually with apps like Hoopla or Libby where you can digitally check out e-books, graphic novels, and audiobooks for free. Like my Netflix watchlist, my to-read pile has continued to grow over the years.

"I read my eyes out and can't read half enough," John Adams wrote to Abigail in 1794. "The more one reads the more one sees we have to read."

That's not a bad problem to have.

Jonathan Burdick runs the public history project Rust & Dirt. He can be reached at jburdick@eriereader.com