Reading For Pleasure Declines in Popularity

As book sales have picked up in the U.S. in recent years, the time spent reading for pleasure and personal interest is nevertheless declining in the country. This is despite the fiction category leading the resurgence in the book market.

According to the Time Use Survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American still spent 23 minutes per day reading in 2004. That declined to just 16 minutes in 2022 after a slight Covid bump in 2021.

A lot of non-readers are skewing the average reading time downwards, however. Taking into account only Americans 15 years and older that do read for pleasure on an average day, average reading time per day in 2022 was 1 hour and 34 minutes, down from a peak of 1 hour and 35 minutes in 2012, but a step up from the 1 hour and 23 minutes recorded in 2004.

Book sales spiked in 2020 and 2021 as coronavirus lockdowns cloistered Americans at home, but the pandemic also disrupted the data collection of the BLS survey, which is why no comparable 2020 figures exist.

According to the data, those 75 years and older were among the most avid readers for pleasure, racking up more than 40 minutes of daily reading time in 2022. Employed Americans read far less, only spending an average of less than 10 minutes on a leisurely read during a workday.