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40% of Britons haven't read a single book in the last 12 months
- IshKebab 2y agoI don't know why that is surprising or worrying. Honestly I suspect the true number is higher. After checking it includes audio books which might explain it, but still... 60% of Britons have read/listened to a book in the last year? I doubt it.
- mvdtnz 2y agoYou don't know why it's worrying that people aren't reading? I don't know what to say about that. I think it's very worrying.
- epicureanideal 2y agoIt would be great if they also asked people why they did or didn’t read a book in the last year, so we could have more insight.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 2y agoPeople make up excuses. Oh didn't have time etc.
- phito 2y agoThere are other ways to learn besides reading books, and it's probably my least preferred method. They often contain a lot of redundant/useless information.
- James_K 2y agoI think you are fooled by the general societal perception that reading makes you smart. This originates from a time when books were expensive and most people couldn't read without paying for private school which made reading the exclusive pursuit of the rich and educated. This is no longer the case. The truth of the matter is that a book is simply one way among many of presenting information. If a person spends 9 hours reading a fiction book for entertainment, they are not substantially better off in life than someone who spent that same time playing video games.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoThe book, even a crappy book by a weak author, will be more thought provoking than the video game.
- SwiftyBug 2y agoWhat do you mean? What makes a book more thought provoking than video games? Disclaimer: I do not play videos games. I just don't enjoy them. I'm not in defence of them. I'm just thought-provoked about why you think video games are essentially less then books.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoWriting is literally the conveyance of thought itself, and nothing else. A picture of a rock might or might not provoke any particular thoughts about rocks in the viewer. But if I write anything more than the purely descriptive "there is a rock" then I have conveyed some sort of thought about the rock or rocks in general, and at the very least you have been introduced to my thought, and very likely you have also reacted with some thought of your own. And the mechanical process of reading gave you the time and venue for that to happen. Even if I do try to be purely descriptive, it's impossible to seperate my perception from the output. I can only describe what I noticed and considered noteworthy. I litetally cannot write the equivalent of a photograph of a rock, but can only write my thoughts about that rock. The photograph may contain more data, but no opinions and no understandings. The viewer can possibly have no thoughts at all about it, and not actively notice most of the data, or the significance of various bits of the data, but the reader must have at the very least the thoughts of the writer, and it will be almost impossible not to have some sort of thougts of their own in reaction to reading the writers. Other things also provoke thought, including video games. But I only asserted "more".
- nickthegreek 2y agoI assure you that Baldur's Gate 3 is more thought provoking than Green Eggs & Ham.
- yungporko 2y agoso 60% of britons have read a book in the last 12 months, this is literally the most positive news i've seen about britain in over a decade. 60% seems nuts based on the people i know in real life.
- LandR 2y agoYeah, I dont believe this at all. Unless they are also counting reading books to their child, but I barely believe that either!
- yk 2y agoThe most common category of organizing a book shelf (other than none) is by size? Why?
- Ekaros 2y agoLooks most reasonable. Aesthetically clean lines are pleasing.
- satiric 2y agoI can understand putting the tall stuff on its own shelf/shelves to save space
- IanCal 2y agoIt's physically easier (no tiny books deep back sandwiches between large encyclopedias), similar books or books in a series are often the same kind of size (cookbooks are larger, paper back novels are smaller), if you know what the book you want looks like it's very easy to narrow down where it is and it's very easy to put things back/together.
- StefanBatory 2y agoI do organize my books by genre (IT/science, high fiction, low fiction, history, non-fiction, language learning). ... and then by size. It's the most aesthetically pleasing for me, genuinely.
- t-3 2y agoBecause books come in different sizes, but the number of different sizes is relatively small. So, if the number of books is more than can be fit on one shelf, it most likely makes the most sense to organize by size.
- epicureanideal 2y agoWhat are the numbers for other countries? What are some possible causes?
- nine_k 2y agoToo much stuff to read already (teh internets). Also, plenty of stuff to watch, or to play. Reading a whole book is a lot of commitment, and, unlike watching another season of whatever, usually can't be done together.
- tobyhinloopen 2y agoI touched a book once
- rasz 2y agoI havent touched a real paper book in at least fife-seven years. Audiobooks, e-books, pdf manuals sure, but paper is dead.
- tobyhinloopen 2y agoI don’t like e-books, I buy my books on paper. (And I read them, but not often) I want to own my books, and ebooks are a Wild West of DRMs. I don’t trust them.
- mjfl 2y agoThey should also quantify how many of the books that people are reading are trash fiction and self-help books. Not many people that read are actually reading substantive, educational works.
- perching_aix 2y agoi love everything about this comment /s
- mjfl 2y agoput the porno book down.
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoTrash fiction? Have you heard of James Joyce? One man's trash is another man's gold mine.
- josefrichter 2y agoI suppose he means Fifty Shades of Grey (the novel) as an example. Is that someone's gold mine?
- cantrecallmypwd 2y agoA "bicycle" for the "mind" where the quoted words are absolutely those things.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y agoToo late, you triggered the relativist mob. Run for your life, mate.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paulluuk 2y agoSo, I listen to about 25 audiobooks per year (mostly fantasy and sci-fi, with a few political, popular science or popular economics book sprinkled between). I'm quite happy about that, because it's something that I can do in bed, while travelling to/from work, while doing groceries, etc. You might say that it's my "escape from reality". But.. well.. who cares? I don't think that my unending love for Dungeon Crawler Carl is somehow making me a better person. I think that something much more relevant is how much exercise people get, how many people do weekly sports or exercise for example? And that's something that the Hacker News crowd in particular will likely score worse on then how many books they read per year.
- timeon 2y agoThis seems bit like anti-intellectualism to me. I perceive mention of physical exercise as red herring here because you can do both. Actually that is what I do also while commuting. Audio books are fine but actual reading is important too. The "escape from reality" is not relevant part but being served without doing the work is.
- jhanschoo 2y ago> Audio books are fine but actual reading is important too. The "escape from reality" is not relevant part but being served without doing the work is. I disagree that audiobooks are not a substitute to actual reading, with respect to your point regarding the medium itself. Perhaps you have a point regarding the kind of material and listening that one can multitask/commute while listening. But stories were first transmitted orally and provoked imaginations and creativity with the same limited information all the same, and continue to. It is arguably the more primitive and natural medium for storytelling but that for a period it was only economical to disseminate them very widely by writing. Whatever beneficent mental work goes into reading fiction especially I believe happens in aural listening. If on the other hand you argue that it is the work that goes into interpreting the written word visually, I would say that the same work happens outside of fiction as well, including all the lowbrow and instrumental reading that we do all the time nowadays.
- 2y ago
- benjaminwootton 2y agoDoomscrolling appears to have totally replaced reading on the commute. I’m not sure it’s that much more virtuous to read a few Dan Browns or John Grisham per year though?
- josefrichter 2y agoTons of people listen to podcasts, that's a massive genre. That's probably better than doom-scrolling, although most podcasts are fluff anyway. It's often just entertainment masked as something intellectual.
- Ekaros 2y agoOther place I can think is in bed before sleep. I would guess that lot of reading happened at that time before too. But ease of smartphones replaced it.
- Aeolun 2y agoDan Brown far beats doomscrolling. No idea who Grisham is.
- SwiftyBug 2y agoDefinitely. It's not like prime literature, but it's good, entertaining reads. I was 12 when I read his books and I got in contact with so many concepts previously unknown. Things about art, the Catholic church, places in Europe, the CERN, the LHC. The first contact I had with the concept of cryptography was reading Digital Fortress. The first time I heard about the NSA was reading Digital Fortress. It definitely expanded my view of the world.
- chneu 2y agoI'll see your 32 James Patterson books and raise you 11 Alastair Reynolds books.
- josefrichter 2y agoThat's very unlikely. The real number is probably higher than 90%, if we're talking about fiction.
- reedf1 2y agoI read 10-20 books a year - but I think this obsession with book reading is excessively chauvinistic. If the benefit of reading is consuming complex long form stories, don't we get that from long-running TV series, audiobooks, visual novels, videogames, manga? If the answer to that is NO - then the benefit is the mechanical act of reading text? Well we do that on social media, news, group chats. I do not see how it is possible that the benefit of reading a book has not been subsumed by all of the content we manage to absorb in modern media.
- Scarblac 2y agoFor me the difference is the amount of focus that reading a long, serious book requires. The other things you mention are much more passive.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y agoHow can you not see that graphic media beams itself right into your lazy brain while reading fiction forces you to exert (and exercise) your visual imagination? Unless you're the type who doesn't form pictures in his mind as he reads on. And (depending on what you read, of course), reading can give you serious literacy gainz. And focus too, as another poster wrote.
- James_K 2y agoI must admit that I find it honestly laughable and pathetic that people are not able to identify the benefits of reading. Reading makes you smarter in large part from the information contained within the book that you learn by reading it, not from some kind of abstract mental exercise you get from looking at words. If you wish to exercise yourself mentally, you would play video games. Yet despite the high cognitive effort of them, no one attributes to games this great enlightenment that supposedly comes from reading. This is because games do not confer any practical information to the player where a book might to the reader.
- anon22981 2y agoI find it laughable this whole thread is people throwing around opinions instead citations
- _mitterpach 2y agoNot all Britons are equally likely to pick up a book. While two-thirds of women (66%) say they have read or listened to a book in the last year, just over half of men (53%) say they have. This is not necessarily unique for Britain and feels like more of a world-wide trend. Of course, this can be partly explained by women reading a lot of romance books, I think it could be a worrying trend for the future. Reading is an important aspect of a man's life. Sitting down and being forced to uninterruptedly focus on a singular task is exactly the kind of thing that is missing from many lives of young men. All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal
- paulluuk 2y agoBut why does that have to be reading? Why can't it be meditation, programming, working out, listening to music, fishing, mountain climbing, going for a walk, or something similar? Why the focus on reading in particular, as if it were some great act? What if someone only reads books written for the MAGA crowd, is that something that many young men are missing in their lives?
- James_K 2y agoSo 60% of Britons have read a book in the last 12 months? That's a pretty good number.
- pgryko 2y agoI suspect it doesn't capture how knowledge is ingested now. I haven't read a book in over a year now. But I do read papers (academic), news articles, technical blogs and YouTube lectures. I practically don't have the time to read for leisure - tech moves very quickly, and that takes up the bulk of my thinking/study time/energy
- beveldropshadow 2y agoEven for leisure, many topics are better served by more timely online options. I certainly read more now than I did before the internet, but that includes only 1 book in the last year.
- PeterStuer 2y ago"YouGov Survey Results Sample Size: 2121 adults in GB Fieldwork: 29th - 30th January 2025" I can't find their methodology anywhere. Given some of the results, I expect: - This is based on self reported unverified answers, probably overinflated in terms of how many books actually read because people don't like to be perceived as a 'non-reader'. - potentially also a selection bias? How were interviewies selected? Ho random was the selection process? Did they randomly phone people (would this count as fieldwork)? Were they standing outside a library or uni? Did they hand out 10.000 forms and put up a dropbox? As a student I worked for some of those companies to which 'fieldwork' eas outsourced. There was not much supervision besides "get back 150 filled out questionairs today".
- card_zero 2y agoSome methodology here: https://yougov.co.uk/about/panel-methodology https://yougov.co.uk/about/panel-methodology They have a panel.
- kubb 2y agoReading a book isn’t always easy and requires dedication. Some time ago I decided to read a Victorian novel in original (English is my second language) and it took me months to complete. Adults only have so much time to read, that you need to do it at an expense of other important things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cantrecallmypwd 2y agoIn America, that number is closer to 55%. The devil is really in the details: not all books are created equal, because simply reading a random fiction book doesn't automatically convey moral or intellectual superiority. Elucidation through deliberate intellectual effort combined with a healthy information diet is necessary beyond simply cargo cult pantomiming one habit or another.
- strogonoff 2y agoIf we are speaking of reading a book to completion, I’d have to admit it’s been perhaps not a full year, but a while. I do not like to read from screens. The next book I was keen on, from the Culture series, arrived from Amazon (ordered new) with signs of heavy water damage, making it unwieldy to read. I have been in a limbo of not wanting to deal with that and not wanting to be wasteful by ordering another one. There are also more non-fiction books that have been in various stages of completion for more months than I would care to admit. However, while I like books, I wonder if in the golden age of information (now drawing to a close) it should be expected that fewer books would be read without a decrease in literacy or education: for a while in somewhat recent past non-fiction books used to be the only way of obtaining a wide variety of information, a lot of which is now covered by numerous other sources (blogs, references, and so on).
- harry_ord 2y agoWhat counts as a book? The survey gives the impression it's just reading for pleasure? This probably plays into the class divide, my wife hates reading (for pleasure) she says that comes from having to read a lot at work. I imagine a lot of people read quite a bit but maybe have less interest in reading in their free time for entertainment.
- IanCal 2y agoI probably fall into this, as long as you don't count kids books. I just don't get much time where * It's a decent block of time * I won't be distracted or need to do something else * I want to be alone * I can be alone * I'm mentally engaged enough * I'm not trying to fit something else in like exercise If you include kids books it's 1-2k but they're not really the same.
- tecoholic 2y agoOn the same boat. With a toddler, there is almost no time to devout to a full book. I got “lucky” due to a 28 hour flight trip and managed to read 1 book.
- internet_points 2y agoI read very little (except kids books) when my kids were younger, now they require less hand-holding I rediscovered my love of reading
- t-3 2y agoTechnically I only read (as in completed) 2 books last year. My average pages per day was ~466 though (e-reader pages, which are not quite 1:1 with real book pages but pretty close, I think).
- kennyloginz 2y agoAnd 90% have lied about it.
- Treegarden 2y agoWell it comes in phases. Last year I read a new book every few days. I probably read 30 books or so, then I got sick of it and stopped. Haven't read a single one since then but also dont care too much about it. I've found watching a tv series and reading a book are very similar. They both share two key issues: First reason there are good and bad books, and finding the good ones is really difficult for me. Just like with a tv show, I will stumble on a book and read it, it will be a great book that really moves me and makes me think. Now hooked on books, I will look for more books. I will read one after the other. I will eventually find one thats tiresome or "bad". I will fight through it. But then when the next book is also not great, I will stop entirely. Exact same happens to me when watching tv shows (last great one was succession). --- Second reason is just getting sick of the medium in general. Like with many things in live I just get sick of reading. It also happens to me when I regularly watch tv shows, at some point I get sick of the activity all together and stop for a few months (or years).
- beardyw 2y agoBeing in my mid 70s I have found that a corpus of fiction amounting to about 100 books is enough for me to read in a cycle without any sense of repetition. One of the benefits of forgetfulness. I do intersperse with a pile of non-fiction, mostly history, which I march through about a chapter at a time.
- chneu 2y agoIt's crazy to me how many comments in here are saying how they don't have time to read. The lack of free time in modern society is the source of so many of our problems. Historically, people had way more leisure and down time. The amateur anthropologist/youtuber Stefan Milos mentioned this in one of his videos recently when talking about human rituals. I'd really like to know how much time folks are spending on their phones instead of doing something that would count as leisure or free time activities. It's not hard to read for 10-30 minutes but I'd wager most people wouldn't bother when they can scroll for that same amount of time, especially in public. It's way easier to shove your face into your phone in public than to read a book. I find myself doing that all the time, so I'm not trying to take anyone down. Remember "being bored" as a kid? Having nothing to do so you'd make up stuff with your friends? Good times.
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- tim333 2y agoI think books are a bit of an outdated format related to mushing up trees, turning them into a product and putting them on shop shelves. I read all the time but seldom whole books these days as they often seem to force an idea which could be communicated in say ten pages to be padded out to 400 pages to fit the retail requirements.
- grantmuller 2y agoThis sentiment seems sort of sad. The medium is the message. If the medium is small, the message will be small. It may be succinct and you may think you "get it", but without evidence, examples, and context, they won't stick. It's like a good tweet: repeatable and rolls of the tongue, but easily refutable and without context. I cannot imagine compressing all of the ideas in a book like "Antifragile" or "Godel, Escher, Bach" in 10 pages. It would be so short as to be meaningless, the ideas are too big. Same for fiction. I don't want 10 pages of world building. I want immersion. "The Sun Also Rises" would be miserable at 10 pages. Nobody is trying to communicate an idea in this case, they're communicating an aesthetic, a "vibe" or a mood. 10 pages of that and on to the next thing? Sure, if that's your medium, but the medium is the message, and the book is a unique medium for communicating big ideas, immersive worlds, and extensive moods and aesthetics. I sure hope the medium for those things isn't out of date or the world will seem a little shallow.
- GeoAtreides 2y agoyo guys maybe next time stagger your comments so the post is not hidden everybody knows that showing too much interest in a story kills it
- johnea 2y agoI "listened" to Dance Monkey, Dance! 27 times. Does that count? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGphsPOHi2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGphsPOHi2M Ernest Cline has a lot more to say than most book authors... "Some of the monkeys read Nietzsche" "The monkeys shave the hair off of their bodies in blatant denial of their true monkey nature" "The monkeys are polluting and raping their planet like there's no tomorrow" "The monkeys like to pretend that everything is Just Fine"
- hayst4ck 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States >Overall, just over half of U.S. adults, 54% or 130 million people, are deficient in basic literacy. Over 40% of Americans don't read at a 6th grade level.