Fewer Than Half of American Adults Read a Book in 2022. That Number Keeps Falling.

Fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind in 2022, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, which runs the country's most comprehensive survey of reading habits. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. The share who read for pleasure on any given day has fallen from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023, based on a study of 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey.

The pattern is not confined to a single group. Writing in The Atlantic's August 2026 issue, Rose Horowitch documents a decline that cuts across age, gender, and education level. Retirees, women, and college graduates, the demographics that historically read the most, have all seen their numbers collapse. One comparison in the piece is blunt: gambling now outpaces reading as a leisure activity. Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

The books are getting simpler too

It is not only how often people read that has changed, but what they read. Sentences in New York Times best sellers today run about one-third shorter than they did a century ago, according to the reporting. Horowitch contrasts the top-selling novel of 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago with its long, layered sentences, against last year's best seller, Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest entry in the Hunger Games young-adult series.

Young-adult fiction is one of the New York Public Library's most popular categories, and not only among the young. Brian Bannon, the library's chief librarian, told The Atlantic that plenty of older adults check it out. Other titles in last year's top 10 included children's books such as the 20th Diary of a Wimpy Kid installment and a Dog Man volume. The most popular novel written for adults was the romantasy Onyx Storm.

Basic skills are eroding

Underneath the shift in taste sits a harder problem: measurable reading ability is dropping. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for a decade. In a 2024 national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were rated proficient at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes or evaluating an author's argument. About the same share scored below basic, meaning they may struggle to draw conclusions from ideas stated plainly in a text.

Amanda Kordeliski, a board member of the American Association of School Librarians, told The Atlantic that librarians have had to buy new books pitched at lower reading levels. Graphic novels and manga are among the fastest-growing categories on their shelves.

Adult numbers have moved the same direction. Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text, up from under 20 percent in 2017.

Reading is losing to watching and listening

The way people take in news reflects the same drift. In 1975, roughly half of Americans in their twenties said they read a newspaper every day. Today fewer than 10 percent do. Most now get the news on phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they would rather watch or listen to online news than read it.

Horowitch frames the trend through the Library of Alexandria, which most contemporary historians believe died not from a single fire but from slow negligence: humidity, mice, and the cost of recopying decaying scrolls. The argument she draws from the classicist Roger Bagnall is that a library allowed to rot is a symptom, not a cause, of a darker turn already underway. The parallel is deliberately uncomfortable. The tools to read remain everywhere; the inclination is what appears to be thinning.

Why it matters beyond the United States

The data here is American, and it should be read as such. But the forces behind it, phones as the default news surface, video and audio displacing text, and shorter attention spans shaping what publishers commission, are not confined to one country. For markets across Asia-Pacific where mobile-first media consumption is already dominant, the American figures function less as a warning about a distant society and more as a preview of pressures that developers, publishers, and educators are likely to encounter closer to home.