The August issue of The Atlantic has an extensive article on how few people are reading books.  The Atlantic  I don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, so I couldn’t read the full article, but I started looking for other articles on the subject. There are many. I’m going to highlight a few and if you’re interested you can read the full articles.

University of Florida and University College London Study

“A sweeping new study from the University of Florida and University College London has found that daily reading for pleasure in the United States has declined by more than 40% over the last 20 years — raising urgent questions about the cultural, educational and health consequences of a nation reading less.

Published today in the journal iScience, the study analyzed data from over 236,000 Americans who participated in the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2023. The findings suggest a fundamental cultural shift: fewer people are carving out time in their day to read for enjoyment.”

“This is not just a small dip — it’s a sustained, steady decline of about 3% per year,” said Jill Sonke, Ph.D., director of research initiatives at the UF Center for Arts in Medicine and co-director of the EpiArts Lab, a National Endowment for the Arts research lab at UF in partnership with University College London. “It’s significant, and it’s deeply concerning.” University of Florida Study

Who’s reading and who isn’t

Black Americans, Americans with less education or lower incomes and those who live in rural areas seem to show a greater drop.  Those with higher educations levels and women are more likely to read, but even they are showing a drop. (A positive is that reading with children hasn’t dropped much, which is good since it helps, not only with school, but also with developing empathy and creativity and helps support mental health and a habit of life long learning.)

Statistics on the decline in reading from 2003 to 2023-  can be found at 2003-2023 Statistic  The concern is, since reading has a profound influence on literacy, education, employment, health, and culture understanding. a decline is worrisome for the future.

Reading for Pleasure?

Karen Dooley, August 21, 2025, states from The Economist Article   “In America, the share of people who read for pleasure has fallen by two-fifths in 20 years, according to a study published in August in iScience, a journal. YouGov, a pollster, found that 40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024. Reading for displeasure is little better: as Sir Jonathan Bate, an English professor at Oxford University, has said, students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”. Even the educated young, another greybeard said, have “no habits of application and concentration”.

Arguably, however, what is happening now is new. It is not just that people are reading less, though they are; the texture of what is being read is changing, too. Sentences are getting shorter and simpler. We analysed hundreds of New York Times bestsellers and found that sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.

As the piece points out, fretting over the decline of reading and literary culture is pretty old, but the ramifications of this decline do seem significant:

A Forbes article has more on this subject: Forbes

The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup 2025 Voices of Gen Z study found that 35% of Gen Z K-12 students say they dislike reading, and 43% say they rarely or never read for fun. In an age of ready-made answers, fewer are wrestling with words on their own. The result may be a workforce fluent in tools but thin on imagination.