Put the book, pick up the phone.
This goes to the United States, where daily reading for fun has dropped more than 40% in adults in the past two decades, according to a new study by the University of Florida and the College University in London.
From 2003 to 2023, the daily reading of leisure decreased at a regular rate of around 3% per year, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Iscience.
“This drop is worrying given the previous evidence of the downward trends for reading for the pleasure of the 1940s until the start of our study in 2003, suggesting at least 80 years of continuous decrease in reading for pleasure,” said the document.
Jill Sonke, one of the authors of the study, said in an interview on Tuesday that the decline was partly because “we know that reading for pleasure, among other forms of artistic participation, is health behavior. It is associated with relaxation, well-being, mental health, quality of life. ”
“We lose a fruit with a low maintenance in our health tool box when we read or participate less in the arts,” added Sonke, director of research initiatives at the UF Center for Arts in Medicine and co -director of the University Epiasts.
The drop in reading occurs because most Americans have more access to books than ever. Due to Libby and other electronic books applications, people do not need to travel to libraries or bookstores. They can consult books from several libraries and read them on their tablets or phones.
But other forms of digital media flourish the free moments that people could devote to books. More time spent scrolling memes and coils on social networks or slipping the restart of the “King of the Hill” on Hulu means less time for the latest choice of the Oprah reading club.
But researchers say that there are factors in addition to digital distraction at stake, including a national decrease in leisure time overall and unequal access to books and libraries.
The study analyzed the data of 236,270 Americans aged 15 and over which completed the survey on the use of American time of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2003 and 2023. [The year 2020 was excluded because data collection was briefly paused amid the COVID-19 pandemic.]
Participants were invited to provide granular details from their activities from 4 am the day before the interview and end at 4 am on the day of the interview.
The researchers found that people who read for pleasure do it for longer stretches – from 1 hour 23 minutes per day in 2003 at 1 hour 37 minutes per day in 2023.
But the percentage of Americans who read at leisure a typical day increased from 28% in 2004 to a minimum of 16% in 2023.
The researchers said that there was a particularly disparity concerning black and white Americans.
The percentage of black adults who read for pleasure culminated at around 20% in 2004 and fell to around 9% in 2023. The percentage of white adults who picked up a book for pleasure culminated at around 29% in 2004 and fell to around 18% in 2023.
The study has shown that women read more for pleasure than men. And that people who live in rural areas had a slightly higher drop in reading pleasure than urban inhabitants in the past two decades.
In rural places, people have less access not only to bookstores and libraries, but also to reliable internet connections, which can contribute to different reading habits, Kate Laughlin, executive director of the assn based in Seattle. For rural and small libraries, in an interview on Tuesday.
Although there have been concerted national efforts to focus on literacy in children, less attention is paid to adults, especially in small cities, said Laughlin.
“When you say” Read for fun “, you assume that reading is pleasant,” said Laughlin. “If someone struggles with the act of reading and interpreting words, it is not hobby; it looks like work.”
While rural America is moving away from industries based on extraction which formerly defined it – such as forest exploitation, coal extraction and fishing – adults with basic literacy try to catch up with the digital literacy necessary in modern labor, said Laughlin.
Rural librarians, she said, often see adults at the end of the twenty and more coming to not read but to learn to use a keyboard and a mouse and configure their first email address so that they can request online work.
According to the study, the percentage of adults reading to children has not decreased in the past two decades. But “the engagement rates were surprisingly low, with only 2% of participants reading with children on the day of the day.”
Among the participants whose data analyzed the researchers, 21% had a child under the age of 9 at home.
The low percentage of adults reading with children “is worrying since regular reading during childhood is a strong determinant of reading capacity and commitment later in life,” said the study. “The low reading rates with children can thus contribute to future reading decreases in adults.”
The researchers noted certain limits of their ability to interpret the data of the American Time Use Survey. A pleasure of pleasure could have been classified, wrongly, like digital activity, they wrote.
Electronic books were only included in the reading category in 2011 and audio books were only included in 2021.
From 2003 to 2006, reading the Bible and other religious texts was included in reading in a personal interest – but was later reclassified and grouped with another participation in religious practice.
In addition, reading on tablets, computers and smartphones has not been explicitly included in examples, which makes it clear if participants in the survey included it as leisure reading or technology use.
“This can mean that we have underestimated total engagement rates, although … we expect such errors to have minimal effects on our results,” they wrote.
