Why no one reads anymore

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Accessibility Links Skip to content. Menu Close. Log in Subscribe. Returning to Austria: Sebastian Faulks. Bryan Appleyard. Thursday September 02 , 5. Another look at American reading habits seemed timely. It would seem that reading in America has declined even further in the past decade. Maybe there are fewer men and more women in America than there used to be, and maybe men tend to eat more French fries.

In that case, the average French-fry consumption would drop even if the typical man and the typical woman continued eating a number of French fries no different from the number they had eaten from time immemorial.

Maybe, for example, as more women have entered the workforce, their full-time employment has left them with less leisure to read. Women read more than men, it turns out, but time spent reading has declined steadily for both genders.

If you break down the data according to employment status , meanwhile, you see that the unemployed do read more, but they, part-timers, and full-timers all read steadily less as the decade went forward. The same applies when you break down the data by race and ethnicity or by age ; you see differences in the amount of reading, but a decline is taking place in almost every subgroup.

A less explored cause might be the recession. Maybe people read less when they have less money? From a breakdown of reading by income quartile , it turns out that the rich read more—but they read less and less every year. All these factors are probably making some contribution to a compositional effect.

But nothing, to my eye, looks substantial enough to explain away the over-all trend: Americans are reading less. A pamphlet explaining the survey is mailed to each subject ahead of the day to be observed. The day after, a survey-taker telephones to ask how the subject spent her time. As a statistic, therefore, the number of average hours spent reading is perhaps less telling than two other statistics: the percentage of the population that did some reading, and the average time that these readers spent on their reading.

In other words, the average reading time of all Americans declined not because readers read less but because fewer people were reading at all, a proportion falling from All we know is that, when Americans sit down to read, they still typically read for about an hour and a half, but fewer are doing so, or are doing so less often.

I can only offer suggestive comparisons. Perhaps whatever is eating away at reading is also eating away at socializing. But, at last, we come to the rival to reading known as television, and find a footprint worthy of a Sasquatch.

Television, rather than the Internet, likely remains the primary force distracting Americans from books.