Under half read one book a year, with Americans more likely to place a bet, survey finds

The writing’s on the wall.

Fewer than half of all American adults read a single book in the space of the year, with gambling becoming a more common leisure activity than reading, according to a bombshell new survey.

The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023, according to the American Time Use Survey carried out by the National Endowment for the Arts.

That figure included people who had read a book, a magazine, a newspaper, or listened to an audiobook or read an e-book.

Only 38% reported reading a novel or short story in 2022, the most recent year for which the data goes up to, the survey said.

And while the odds of finding a reader among the American public are low, you would have a much better chance of finding a gambler.

In 2025, more than half (57%) of Americans placed a bet either online or in person, according to the survey.

The decline in reading cut across all age groups, genders, and education levels, with even the groups traditionally most inclined to love the written word—retirees, women, and college graduates—turning away from books.

The study, which surveyed 236,000 Americans’ leisure habits, also found that the books people read have changed.

In 1958, the best-selling novel of the year was an English translation of Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,” reported the Atlantic.

Last year, that honor went to “Sunrise on the Reaping,” the latest in the young-adult series the Hunger Games.

Other titles in the New York Times best seller list included the children’s books “Partypooper,” the 20th installment in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series, as well as “Dog Man: Big Jim Believes.”

New York Times best sellers now have sentences around one-third shorter than they were a century ago, pointing to the average reader’s shorter attention span.

The national literacy crisis also appears in America’s schools, where, in 2024, just 35% of high-school seniors were found to be “proficient” at analyzing complex fictional themes or evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument.

Roughly the same number scored below “basic” in the same test, indicating they may struggle to conclude concepts in a text or use context clues to determine the meaning of a word.

Almost 30% of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text, up from less than 20% in 2017.

And experts warn this trend could be about to get much worse.

The study found only 2% of American adults read to a child on any given day, while between 1984 and 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8% to 29%.

But, somewhat contradictorily, at the same time as reading figures plummet, bookstores both large and independent have made a comeback in recent years.

Barnes & Noble, as well as independent booksellers, once seen as dinosaurs in the wake of the rise of Amazon and death of borders, have seen new stores open and higher sales in the past decade.

“The revival is there,” Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, who took over the company in 2019, told Axios.