How many books did you read last year? If it’s just one, congratulations – you’re in elite company.
You see, reading has become niche.
In its August issue, The Atlantic published a cover story by Rose Horowitch called “The End of Reading is Here”, laying out alarming trends:
- In a year, fewer than half of adults in the U.S. read a single book of any kind.
- Only 38% read a novel or short story.
- Just 16% of Americans read for pleasure on any given day.
- Only 2% of adults read to a child.
- 29% of 13-year-olds say they rarely or never read for fun; that figure was just 8% 40 years earlier.
One survey found that in middle school and high school, some English teachers assign zero books. Instead, they rely on short passages.
At Harvard, one sociology professor learned through a course evaluation that students resented the volume of assigned reading. He asked Margaret Rennix, an assistant director for humanities and social sciences support, to explain to his class that excerpts and summaries can’t compete with a primary text. Rennix characterized how many students felt: “By asking them to read, professors are arbitrarily withholding information by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”
Meanwhile, Horowitch writes that many kindergarten teachers say incoming students don’t even know nursery rhymes or fairy tales. But they do know their devices. She talked to one pre-K teacher who prevents her three-year-old students from using them, and described the reaction of one: “Typically, students cry maybe the first couple weeks and say they want their mom. But this student would cry for her tablet.”
We’re getting dumber
Reading is changing, The Atlantic noted. People are “bombarded with…textual fragments”: emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. “This explosion has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.”
What do we lose? Based on studies:
- Just 35% of high school seniors are deemed “proficient” at analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating an author’s argument.
- Among children experiencing more screen time and less reading time, their brains have less well-developed white matter in areas associated with executive function and language.
- Nearly 30% of American adults can’t paraphrase or make inferences from a multi-page text.
In the article, Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, says we’re starting to squander higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.
American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, reason effectively and analyze patterns is declining. Their vocabulary is smaller compared to those with an equivalent education level 50 years ago. And while correlation isn’t causation, average IQ scores are dropping by about three points a decade, reversing a trend that dated back a century.
Is there hope for reading?
Even the positive data hides troubling signs. While audiobooks are surging in popularity, Horowitch says that points in part to a desire to multitask. And the threefold increase in Amazon’s monthly book releases since 2022 coincides with ChatGPT’s launch. (Read about the rise of AI-generated books here and here. Some “authors” churn out dozens of titles a year.)
I checked readership levels in Canada, and they’re higher here. As BookNet Canada reported in May, 79% of Canadians said they read a book in 2025; half did so weekly and 31% daily.
Still, most Canadians read occasionally, with a minority of super-readers. Among readers, 47% finished 1-5 books last year, 29% said 6-11, 19% said 12-49, and 6% racked up 50 or more books.
This mirrors a U.S. pattern. Horowitch asserts that today’s avid readers are part of a subculture; in the U.S., 20% of adults accounted for more than 80% of books read last year.
“When you see someone on the train reading printed matter, it feels like a statement,” she writes. “Brandish a book too ostentatiously in public, and you might find yourself accused of ‘performative reading’. The label presumes the person is only trying to telegraph that they are highly educated or possess superior literary taste – why else would they lug a book around?”
I don’t lament the decline in reading because I’m a bookworm, but because I worry what it means for society.
Reading isn’t the only way to inhabit other worlds, gain raw material to form our views or help you think critically – but I can’t think of many better ways. Whatever the type of book, reading strengthens our ability to stay with a story, idea or feeling long enough for it to matter.
And in a culture built around distraction, we sure could use more reflection.
Stuart Foxman is a Toronto-based freelance writer, who helps clients’ products, services, ideas and organizations to come alive. Connect with me here on LinkedIn, or check me out at foxmancommunications.com where I share these blogs too. More original posts coming regularly about communications, information, motivation, writing, branding, creativity, media, marketing, persuasion, messages, learning, etc.
July 22, 2026