What’s the title for? Is it about “reading” or is it about “books” ?
A lot of people who say they “read books” really mean they bought one or checked it out from the library, then only dipped into it here and there, maybe a few paragraphs at a time.
I haven’t read a proper book cover to cover in years, probably not since high school. But I do read a lot every single day, either for my job or because I genuinely want to grow professionally. I’ll also read a few chapters from books friends or coworkers recommend, especially the parts that seem most relevant. I just don’t really see why I need to finish the whole thing if I’m already getting what I came for.
My parents, meanwhile, will read the same books over and over again, cover to cover, every year.
The survey this is based on[1] counts listening to audiobooks as "reading", which can only inflate the numbers.
I have nothing against audiobooks, but they are not the same as reading. It is a passive consumption of the content. You can daydream or lose focus and the story keeps rolling on. If you lose focus while reading, the story stops. You may find that you've "read" a few sentences, but it's quickly self-correcting.
Additionally, reading forces you to parse tone, interpret context, and resolve syntactic ambiguity on your own. Listening to a narrator removes those tasks.
I think that this door was opened when we started accepting that reading graphic novels was the same as reading a book of text. Rather than elevating new(ish) media for storytelling for their own merit, we've lumped them into another medium that was already deemed "good".
All that said, listening to an audiobook or reading a graphic novel is still better than not reading a book at all.
1: https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/53804-most-a...
I'm kind of shocked that 60% of all US adult citizens did report reading a book during the year. That seems much higher than I would have expected.
It is a self-reported measure, and it's phrased "read or listened to"--I don't normally think of "listening to audiobooks" when I think about reading, and I can imagine how that might broaden the pool. Other sources (e.g. the NEA survey at [0]) seem to put print book readership closer to 50%.
Though at least one survey [1] points out the wide range of genres that count as books for this purpose: manga, the Bible/Torah/Quran, cookbooks...
[0] https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-... [1] https://gitnux.org/readership-statistics/
3 in 5 actually seems pretty high, in particular if they really did read a complete book. I tend to only start and never finish them.
> 8 Books - Average number of books Americans read in 2025. However, the median American only read 2 books, showing that heavy readers significantly increase the overall average.
I don't know, my reaction is "wow, Americans truly love reading," or alternatively, "they really like to boast their numbers even in anonymous surveys."
Even if you only read fiction, 8 books are like 500k to 100k words. That's a lot of words!
What is going on with the quality of the comments on HN? I could have never predicted these comments here 10 years ago.
What fraction of Americans are capable of reading a book (i.e. not functionally illiterate)?
I admit I have not properly read a single book in a couple of years.
These days when it comes to technical stuff I much more prefer to fill in gaps by reading articles or documentation. Technical books are so long it feels like authors are paid by words.
And when it comes to fiction I have really leaned into audiobooks. My eyes are too tired from computer work, and I can combine audio with other activities like jogging or cooking.
There are some "technical" audiobooks as well, but only a small category of technical books makes sense in the audio format.
Does reading to a toddler count? If it does, I'm bringing up the mean to say the least.
I highly doubt 60% have read book.
If you click the article it actually says "read or listened", so this includes also audiobooks, which is cheating, those 60% would shrink significantly without audiobooks.
And I don't think this is really US specific, it won't be much better elsewhere, most of the people just don't have energy/time to read book, they will rather watch content or read shorter articles.
Me as European also didn't read (or listened) book in years, I don't see the added value. After working and taking care of kids I will watch movie/TV show and maybe short time Youtube. I have to read lot of law documents and user guides as part of my work, those can be longer than some short books though, so not sure what this tells about me.
Meanwhile my kids are bookworms, they can easily read 5 books per week and I read book to them every evening (I didn't count these as my books, it's books for kids, I read to them for sure at least 20-30 books per year).
My family is doing our part to keep the average up (despite me being part of the family). I read one book last year, and it wasn't so much a single story as a collection of short non-fiction stories. I've read various chapters of some business books. But most of my reading is shorter form content like on here or articles.
But! We take our kids to the library every couple of weeks, and while we do let them check out Nintendo games, they also will each pick a stack of books. So my kids are going through 4-8 books a month. And my wife is part of a book club at the library so she's doing 8-10 in a year at least.
But for myself, I just have a hard time sitting down to do it. By the time I'm done with work and chores, it's late at night, and my brain barely has enough power to handle a TV show.
How do all y'all readers with young kids do it? How do you find the time?
The definitions are a bit vague - does it have to be cover to cover or part of a book? I seldom read cover to cover these days because it's easy to just get the bits you are interested in.
Out of curiosity I looked at my ios books app to see how many I read and it says I only read one book in 2025 and one book in 2026. This is completely wrong - I've read 4 books since Jan 1 and last year maybe 10 to 15 books (mostly trashy sci-fi and fantasy)
When I looked closer in the app it's because all of my books are 99% finished because I didn't click in every page until the end. Annoying.
I use my garmin connect app to track exercise, blood pressure, water consumption, etc. it would be cool to have something similar for the mind.
I still read a few books per year, but I wonder if this still matters as much as it used to. In the past, I used to read 10-20 books per year and now it's more like 3-5.
The reduction is from a lot more time spent on educational series on YouTube and other paid video sources. Is it intrinsically bad if I trade 1 book for 10 hours of instructional videos?
Somehow I thought it would have been lesss...
Aren't 1 out of 5 Americans functionally illiterate? [1] There is no way this is correct.
[1] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
Non-fiction books tended to be padded with a bunch of fluff to get them to saleable book-length.
More surprised that 3 did
I am in the "did not read a single book" bucket, and have been for many years. I just don't like reading books, and never have.
A lot of effort has gone to comment without reading the stats. I'll read the survey for you all:
https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/docume...
Yes it includes audiobooks in "books".
physical books were around three times more popular than ebooks or audiobooks.
75% did not read anything to children (kind of surprising 25% of the population has access to pre-literate children)
15% don't read books they own, which is surprisingly high. A third borrowed their books from the library.
54% of the population inaccurately think they "own" an ebook as opposed to reality. 40% "a book you accessed for free online" Sure thats all project gutenberg LOL.
Mysteries and Crime are top of the charts. I have no idea if "computer books" count as 11% other non-fiction or academic or hobbies.
Only 51% have a library card. I know they are cracking down hard at my library, show up physically with proof of residence or it gets cancelled. Its harder to get a library card in my community than to vote, get a job, or register for school, your community may vary.
Most people go to the library less than once a month. This sounds about right.
Shockingly 20% of people never go to the library just to hang out. As a parent of older kids I do that a LOT, drop them off then go silently read or compute or whatever at the library. The attempt at turning libraries from book warehouses into makerspaces seems to not be working very well according to this survey.
People own a surprisingly small number of books. A "large full height bookcase" puts you in the elite. I'm kind of surprised at that.
Virtually no one hoards digital or audio books, I am apparently a far extreme outlier in that regard LOL. I'm easily five figures each. From, uh, totally legit sources.
Most people actually own about two dozen books and think most other people own about twice as many around fifty.
Since I was a little kid I always read a little before bedtime and it seems this is very popular.
Most people don't organize their books but think they have an easy time finding them (not unlike how people organize computer files...)
Surprisingly there is zero to very minimal demographic difference in every category among people who do not read, which I find very surprising and unlikely.
reading books these days is more akin to visiting the theatre. its a special cultural occasion that you might do once a year to remind yourself that this stuff is still out there, but for actual practical purposes reading books is probably the slowest method of ingesting information today.
Who cares? So much books are just slop (pulp), or, these days, over 70% filler. Even if they are "decent" fiction or non-fiction, the majority still are almost entirely shallow entertainment, whether explicitly or implicitly as simplistic "edutainment" of some kind. There are blogs, articles, technical papers, heck, even user discussions that contain far greater depth and/or demand far greater attention and mental work than the vast majority of "books" out there today.
Just thinking "reading books" is something good or impressive borders on anti-intellectual in the world of the internet. A much better indicator of real intelligence is e.g., does a person read actual scientific papers or technical documents, or sites like ACX, HN, SeriousEats (or any other site which dives into any hobby or art with research and with long-form articles), do they know about e.g. SciHub and LibGen and Anna's Archive, do they know about people like James Hoffmann if they are into coffee, or Kenji Lopez if into home cooking, and I'm sure hundreds of other careful and obscure podcasts and individuals, discussion forums, and other digital textual sources.
Yes, please have read some serious books and works in your life, at some point (preferably some classic and modern literature and philosophy, but anything with real depth is good). But worship of "books" simpliciter is pure midwit in 2025 (and was so already in 2010, at bare minimum).
So 3 in 5 did? That's a much larger number that I would have expected!
I read 29 books in 2025. I'm making up for all the young slackers.
I have hope in know that at least 40% of American's are still literate. I hope to read more books than last year (about 5 last year favorite being John Greens TB book)
To be pedantic, this means than 2/5 americans read more than a single book or no books at all. Which would mean that 3/5 of americans did read a single book.
That's actually better than I feared.
The other 2 are lying.
this doesnt surprise me at all
What about audio books, magazines, news, websites, studies?
Reading is so much more than curated dead trees.
I don't buy that anywhere near that many people read a book in 2025. People lie and say they read because they want to sound smarter and more cultured.