In 2004, roughly 28
percent of Americans age 15 and older read for pleasure on a given
day. Last year, the figure was about 19 percent.
That steep drop
means that aggregate reading time among Americans has fallen, from an
average of 23 minutes per person per day in 2004 to 17 minutes per
person per day in 2017.
Reading declines are
higher among men. The share of men reading for pleasure on any given
day fell from 25 percent in 2004 to 15 percent in 2017, a drop of
nearly 40 percent. The decline among women was a more modest 29
percent, from 31 percent in 2003 to 22 percent in 2017.
The survey data
shows declines in leisure reading across all age levels.
Percentage-wise, the likelihood of reading declined the most among
Americans ages 35 to 44, with smaller declines for both younger and
older age groups.
The American Time
Use Survey is based on a nationally representative sample of about
26,000 individuals. Respondents answer questions and fill out
detailed time diaries about how they spent the previous day. The
large sample size means the survey's time-use estimates are extremely
precise relative to traditional phone surveys, which may involve only
1,000 people or fewer.
The findings on
reading comport with some other recent data on American reading
trends. Numbers from the National Endowment for the Arts show that
the share of adults reading at least one novel, short story, poem or
play in the prior year fell from 57 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in
2015.
Survey data from the
Pew Research Center and Gallup have shown, meanwhile, that the share
of adults not reading any book in a given year nearly tripled between
1978 and 2014.
It's tempting to
blame the decline on the recent proliferation of computers,
cellphones, video games and the like. But the data don't really bear
that out. For one, the NEA data show that reading has been on the
wane since at least the 1980s, well before the advent of Facebook and
Fortnite.
A long-term study of
reading trends in the Netherlands points to a different culprit:
television. From 1955 to 1995, TV time exploded while weekly reading
time declined. “Competition from television turned out to be the
most evident cause of the decline in reading,” the authors of that
study concluded.
In the United
States, the American Time Use Survey shows that while the average
reading time fell between 2004 and 2017, the average amount of time
watching TV rose.
In 2017, the average
American spent more than 2 hours 45 minutes per day watching TV,
every day of the year, or nearly 10 times the amount of time they
devoted to reading for pleasure.