Reading For Fun Is Plummeting In the US, and Experts Are Concerned (sciencealert.com) 127
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S., which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services. The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults.
"This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average.
Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible." The findings have been published in the journal iScience.
"This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average.
Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible." The findings have been published in the journal iScience.
Not surprised (Score:2, Insightful)
Anti intellectualism will do that. Look who runs the department of education for an example.
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Well least we don't have cage fighting at the White House. Oh wait. Never mind.
Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Funny)
I haven't been paying attention to the Transpondian News. Is this how Trump is selecting cabinet members today, instead of squeezing the hooters and checking if she spits or swallows?
Is there mud? And un-peeled bananas?
Yet?
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that damage is going to be something we see down the track. The kids who are getting their educations fucked up now because steaming goons are burning books and banning anything that doesnt look like an 1800s schoolmaster screaming at kids to do their 3xRs.. We'll see that damage in 10-15 years.
Whats happening now I think has a lot to do with the damage we're doing to our cognitive 00executive functioning by being glued to screens all day. There *might* be other things but this one seems obvious.
I used to finish a book every couple of weeks. And I *somehow* managed to hold enough of an attention span to spend a decade in academia, loads of reading. Now I struggle to get past the first chapter because my attention span is toasted before my attention span fritzes and I'm back to reading ragebait on scoial media. SOMETHING is going on, and I think its social media hijacking our reward circuits and fucking up our attention spans.
And the poor kids, they've had this damage going on all their lives. God knows we've already fucked our democracies up by losing grip with reality, what comes next with an entire generation of black-screen cooked ADHD-alikes is anyones guess.
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Huh? It's the opposite of what you say.
Teachers aren't allowed to criticize students or even physically discipline them. Meanwhile, the bar for graduating keeps getting lowered by the education system. Books from the 1800, 1900, etc... are being even more scrutinized for being politically incorrect. That is the complete opposite to what you'd see prior to the 21st century.
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Anti intellectualism will do that. Look who runs the department of education for an example.
The Leave No Moron Behind policies that reduced the American classroom down to the lowest dumbnominator, didn’t fall off the back of the DoE truck yesterday. Neither did turning the entire American education system into a liberal cesspool of political indoctrination. Let’s try and remember that before we assume a single administration or political party is to blame.
Greed infected education. We fucked the kids and their future when we started tying dollars to grades.
Anti-intellectualism, hedonism, or ressentiment? (Score:5, Interesting)
The classic work on anti-intellectualism could be The Closing of the American Mind [worldcat.org] but warnings have been ringing out for centuries, even before Buck v. Bell [justia.com], that our species was in decline. Guys like Francis Galton [galton.org] warned us that Idiocracy [criticker.com] was inbound because as the Victoria Era faded, it was clear that some kind of serious decline had set in. The eugenicsts said we were getting physically dumber; Bloom and friends argue that our political need for easy answers led us to partial truths and what Michael Crichton called "thintelligence," or specialized but inch-deep analysis.
Others would argue that we are simply pursuing distraction, as Amusing Ourselves to Death [worldcat.org] argues, or in pursuit of mindless hedonism as Brave New World [goodreads.com] asserts. It is not so much that we are anti-intellectual for the sake of smashing down intellectualism or finding easy answers, these authors argue, it is just that we (or most of us, the most important marketing demographic) simply do not care.
Finally, we come down to the F.W. "Friendly Fred" Nietzsche argument, which is that people are motivated by either desire to conquer themselves, or fall into ressentiment [worldcat.org] or a type of bitter destructive envy of others; the classic expression of that is the guy saying "if I can't have her, no one else can either" as he stabs his ex-girlfriend to death. You see it at jobs all the time, the many complainers trying to pull down the few people doing something useful.
Anyway, hope that little reading list conquers some anti-intellectualism. Teach the controversy!
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"At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future" by Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie.
We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by
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we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest
I have not seen any rigorous, scientific evidence that "smarter" children were more likely to survive than "dumber" children. You can be "smart" and still die just as easily from the same things that killed most children throughout history - smallpox, the plague and various other infectious diseases (such as measles), diarrhea diseases, malaria, a serious infection from a paper cut, not enough food, and war / conflict.
And even IF there was "selection" for smarter people, it would take thousands and thousa
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The authors do not make that claim. They say that more intelligent parents will tend, on average, to have more children who survive to reproduce successfully.
Re:Not surprised [when the AI can read it for you] (Score:2)
Mod parent Funny. Or please explain the insight rather than the obvious sarcasm.
My attempted joke is in the modified Subject. Many of the AI books I have read for "fun" have been recipe books about creating LLM dishes as the main course. But currently reading one that is more like a book of serving suggestions. "Teaching" how to write "killer" prompts for various effects. The funniest examples are telling the AI to "read" various things and produce short summaries. The AI understands nothing, but it can hel
Get Rid of the Department of Education (Score:2)
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Nothing to do with trump or anti-intellectualism. We live in a society with a lot of shiny things. Dopamine doom-scrolling, short-form video content, addictive-by-design social media.
People are reading and processing all day long. People are overstimulated.
Reading is a past-time for the under-stimulated people. So teenagers and young adults have started asking mom and dad for feature-phones and dumb-phones, even phones designed to stop attention grabbing push notifications, pop-ups, advertisements.
The youth
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? You don't think defunding libraries, demonizing librarians, banning books and ridiculing authors as "elites" discourages people from reading for fun?
There are more materials than ever. (Score:2)
I can download more reading materials in epub or pdf format than ever before. For example, I regularly read old sci fi pulp magazine on archive.org and can access both current and classics on the online library in our state. That is just a start. Our local library is only open 3-4 days a week and it pretty much useless. This has not in the slightest inhibited my reading for enjoyment.
Bottom feeders (Score:2)
Those issues are only known to people who care because they already read. Libraries are obsolete but reading has never been easier or more convenient.
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Individual cities, and townships fund their own libraries, which has nothing to do with Federal government without considering federal overreach.
Article 1, Section 8, does not give the Federal Government the right to draw taxes such that it can fund our local libraries. You pay taxes and sales taxes at the local level for this.
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Strongly promoted by America's PR department. If that is how America's government want their population to be perceived, well their wish is granted.
The interesting thing, to me, is that from TFS, the work was carried out on lab animals form Florida, but at least some of the work (experimental design, statistical analysis ... ? I'd have to care enough to RTFA) and a significant part of the credit is done by researchers in London.
If a tree falls in the forest, and all the press
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
He didn't blame it on the Department or the current administration. Other way round: There is a long standing trend of anti-intellectualism, and only in that climate (and in a visionary movie like Idiocraty) would such offices be given to Pro-Wrestlers.
But that whole thing started way longer.
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Re: Not surprised (Score:4, Informative)
The anti-phonics trend was not some liberal partisan thing, as you attempt to portray it. The whole language thing got a huge boost from George W. Bush and the whole No Child Left Behind crap.
It also has its roots outside of America, primarily New Zealand. The whole language thing method took off more because certain textbook companies committed to it than anything else.
There was a tendency for liberal educators to buy into the bullshit about phonics being discriminatory, and there were some conservatives who pushed back against this. But that is hardly the whole story, as you attempt to frame it.
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Cherry picking doesn’t prove a point. Counter examples abound. Anti-phonic “Ebonics” , for example, traces its roots way back too - to 1973! It’s the equivalent of the “Seattle Math”, mainstreaming, restorative justice, etc that I mentioned - all heavily supposedly “progressive intellectual” examples that you very carefully avoided. You also avoided addressing “fascist” Florida and Louisiana significantly advancing minority achievement in k-12 whil
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all heavily supposedly “progressive intellectual” examples that you very carefully avoided
It's weird that you accuse me of cherry-picking when that's what you're doing. There are a ton of pedagogical theories, movements, and ideologies that could all be described as "liberal" and they all compete and at times were supported by various people of various political persuasions.
Were most of those people liberal? Yes. But most people involved in education are liberal. The people who toppled the anti-phonics movement—not the state politicians that railed against it for being "politically correct
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> don't know enough about the statistics you're citing to make an informed comment about it
Yet you know enough to confidently state “it's not related to phonics vs. whole language” and to characterize as “weird ideas” my bog standard interpretation of Critical Theory based on Crenshaw, Delgado, and Kendi, that uses the extremely popular book in teaching college curriculums “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” as a guideline. Wrong.
It’s undeniably true that Critical Theory
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Thus demonstrating yet again that it doesn’t take a lot of resources to teach well - instead, pragmatic skilled teaching is, by far, the biggest driver of a great education. I’ve seen studies that show moving proven teachers to a supposedly “bad” school results in dramatic improvements in student outcomes (although the moved teachers tend to burn out within a few years after dealing with unsupportive administrators and their fellow teachers). Similar studies show moving students out
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I've got just three words for you... (Score:2)
"Dungeon Crawler Carl"
Now get out there and Read Read Read.
reading all day (Score:4, Interesting)
You are reading this right now. Many adults sit at a computer all day and we read the screen all day. Should the majority of my waking hours be about reading?
Re: reading all day (Score:2)
Came here to say this.
Though, I suppose with the gen z and gen alpha types, the majority probably just watch tik toks and play Fortnite.
Re:reading all day (Score:5, Insightful)
Is a decrease in "hard" reading a cause for concern? Instinctively I'd say yes as I notice a difference for me, but I don't really know. That's a knee-jerk reaction, and concern from writers and librarians don't come with a factual conclusion on the impact to your brain in the long-term. This whole thing is just an observation of what's happening, with no answer on "so what".
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Re:reading all day (Score:4, Insightful)
I was very sad when I first noticed Amazon reviews of books with reader comments such as, "Too many long words", "Old-fashioned language", etc. Try reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", or anything by Dr Johnson, or even light reading like Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope. Some people nowadays would find Mark Twain too heavy and complicated.
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For any Slashdot comrade who is not an avid reader but would like to experience the joy of reading, I would suggest H.G.Wells.
There is a lot of proto-science fiction, and future imagining, which might appeal to the Slashdot reader interests, but they are written between 1895 and 1941, which I think is a sweet spot to 2025 ears. It's not so old that it's difficult to understand (like Shakespeare), but it is old enough to be full of words phrases that sound wonderful.
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I'd have to RTFA - which I don't care sufficiently to waste time on - to inspect the details of the questions asked, but that would be one of the things I'd design the questionnaire to illuminate. Maybe, mixing straight questions with ones about "here is a scenario ... and some questions" and mixing scenarios between respondents so that different individuals are tested for orthogonal questions.
Complex. But that's Experimental Design for you. When I studied Stats, it was a major sub-domain.
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I was wondering about that too. You can read everything on Project Gutenberg on a tablet and even a phone. Then there are all the kindles out and about.
Should they count reading Slashdot? Or do they only count novels? They did say reading for pleasure so I assume they do not mean technical manuals Mr. Scott not withstanding.
My daughter spends an awful lot of time reading fan fiction on her phone, does that count?
So many questions come to mind.
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You are reading this right now. Many adults sit at a computer all day and we read the screen all day. Should the majority of my waking hours be about reading?
Reading /. isn't for fun, it's to dull the pain of a work day.
Patience (Score:2)
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There is definitely a leisure time component.
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This. YouTube has conditioned me to crave dopamine in 12 minute rushes. Even worse for kids these days who are addicted to tiktok and youtube shorts. Their attention span is measured in seconds. Still worse, they think its okay to film everything in portrait mode.
TLDR (Score:3)
TLDR is a slashdot synopsis of the issues. If satisfaction can't be achieved in 10 seconds (via text, AI summary, meme, or other quick sound byte), the younger generation seems to move on hoping for something else to tickle their fancy.
There's nothing like a good well written book. But books by modern authors frequently have many typos or wrong words or other issues. You can't even hire proofreaders or good editors anymore, evidently.
It's tough to read a book a day. I managed that one year - a bit over 88,000 pages. Down to 80,000 pages the year after that. I set my goal at 200 books this year and have achieved that, but haven't stopped. There's such a wide range to choose from today, it's hard to understand people who choose not to read. Challenge your mind. I'm reading some of Mark Hewitt's novels now. He's a far right wing conservative author that lets his bias show on every other page. But I find it worth a read just to see how the far far ultraconservative right thinks.
Mark Twain's comment "A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read." is still true today.
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A /. Reader focused on right wing drivel? Omg!
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That's probably Twain quoting Voltaire. It has the "Voltaire" acidity.
One of these days I'll actually have to read some Twain, beyond the expurgated kiddies books, that is. The number of times I've read references to the "Connetticut [Connecticut even!] Yankee at the Court of King Arthur", I really should read it. But when it comes to enthusiasm, I've never even looked to see if there is any Twain at
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I went to the physical library - because I strongly prefer ink-on-dead-tree for "pleasure" reading.
No Twain in any of the sub-divisons of the "Fiction". half.
I've probably had multiple Twains in the pile of Gutenbergs on the server. I really should switch that on some month, If I feel the need.
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Climbing a molehill may give you a tiny dopamine bump. But climbing a real hill, or even a mountain, will give you feelings you can't get otherwise.
Nietzsche was right when he recommended walking in the mountains. Nowadays that takes willpower, organisation, and persistence.
Still, it's worth it.
Audiobooks (Score:2)
Audiobooks and a significant library inventory boost of titles were a game-changer for me in the last 10 years. I listen to a couple books a month when I'm driving, or doing anything around the house. I have shit to do, and can't always sit down and just do that.
Sometimes when working if it doesn't require writing. It would be expensive without the library - although if I really want a particular title I'll reactivate Audible. I wonder if the study counted listeners?
Also I'd be interested to see a gender b
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That too, would be one of the things I'd look to address in designing the experiment.
I guess there's always TFA to read, if you want to know.
yet another self-reporting survey (Score:5, Insightful)
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Funding for libraries has been cut. https://www.edweek.org/policy-... [edweek.org]
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Some, at least, of the authors are already working across an ocean and in a foreign jurisdiction. Do you want to make it more complicated.
I'm wondering why the London-based researchers used US people as lab-rats. Cheaper? Fewer regulatory hoops to back-flip through. Maybe doing such a study on UK students would be just illegal, or illegal to share their data with foreign researchers. Maybe that's next year's publication, with other countries to follow - wouldn't be the first multi-country study to release d
I mean it's not a lot of work (Score:2)
Don't think it's that it was them being lazy I think it's that the stuff you are talking about is already known so they wanted to do a proper survey.
There is nothing wrong with a self-reporting survey as long as your data set is large enough and representative enough. I haven't read
Public Education (Score:3)
For decades, kids have been told by teachers in public education that they aren't reading the right books, they aren't reading the right way. Teachers are more concerned with improving their test scores than encouraging kids to read for fun; those kids have now grown up and graduated. People who read for fun generally do so despite the teachers rather than because of them. Mix in that COVID taught kids and parents that school wasn't all that important, the rise in AI-generated books, and you have a perfect storm for functional illiteracy.
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Teachers are more concerned with improving their test scores
Piss off.
By and large teachers hate the shit they are more or less forced to do by the education system.
Blame the arseholes you voted for not the poor sods at the bottom.
it's all propaganda anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
I stopped reading new releases because it's all propaganda. The publishing houses are very tightly controlling what makes it to press, and if it doesn't conform to a certain set of opinions, it never sees the light of day. So, since I refuse to be propagandized, I just won't read their stuff. Same goes with movies and television.
The current book I'm reading Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, was published in 1907. Amazing how much good stuff is in the public domain now.
Re:it's all propaganda anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
Being a conservative must be mentally exhausting. So many hurdles and mental gymnastics you go through daily. I had to listen to this whole big explanation about separating the art from the artist from a Trumper because all the live bands he sees contradict his beliefs.
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I don't know who or what Wagner is but do you mean this guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Yeah...
Wagner had publicly analysed the Oedipus myth before Freud was born in terms of its psychological significance, insisting that incestuous desires are natural and normal, and perceptively exhibiting the relationship between sexuality and anxiety
Sounds like he'd fit right in with MAGA today.
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Careful, your TDS is showing.
Re:it's all propaganda anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah. It's pretty easy. Truth is Truth, no matter what. Now the other side, I can totally see how that would be mentally exhausting. You need to hold two mutually conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time and believe both are true -- on so many issues.
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I've noticed the opposite. The barrier for "publishing" a book is a lot lower now, especially with e-books so the amount of stuff out there has exploded and tons of stuff that would never see the light of day now gets published. The big problem just seems to be a general reduction in quality as a lot of that stuff is just crap - a lot of badly written and cliche stories, plot holes, typos, grammar mistakes, poorly written prose, books that are clearly targeted to an adult audience in terms of subject matt
New bookstores? (Score:2)
Is it really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Compare that to the amount of time spent on media consumption today. Seriously?!?
I think the main complaint here is that "books" are not being read, ignoring all other forms of media. That's fine, I prefer reading to watching myself. I read hundreds of actual books a year, and have for decades. Almost all are for fun, and the form nowadays is almost always an ebook.
While I do agree with Mark Twain ("A person who does not read has no advantage over one who cannot read"), I would substitute "learn". Whether learning from a well-researched and written book (fiction or non), or from an artfully-crafted entertainment video or documentary, learning should be the result.
Yes, most "content" is garbage. We get what we ask for, after all. If you doubt that, create a new online persona that inquires only about classical literature, and see what kind of suggestions populate your news feeds.
Reading for Fun? Absolutely my preference. But then, I never got hooked on TikTok. Crack either, for that matter, as though there were a difference.
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In terms of non-trivial content (i.e. stuff published for profit, by corporations with reporting chains) "we" get what focus-group panels tell their interviewers they want. And with these things being expensive, the focus groups chosen are going to be cheap (so, local to "Head Office" ; and as small as statistically possible) and quick.
Many people blame statistics for the misuse of statistics by people who try to answer questions on the ch
No, they aren't reading books for fun. (Score:2)
Doom reading, A Geeks Reading List (Score:2)
Comic books were a gateway to reading (Score:2)
Do they count kindle? (Score:2)
Get your kid a kindle unlimited subscription. Books may not be the top1%, but they are good and can inspire a love for reading for cheap.
Also, to those naming good books, try:
The Vorkosogian books by Lois McMaster Bujold.
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"For the purposes of the study, it was considered reading for pleasure if participants read a book, magazine, newspaper, or e-reader, or listened to an audiobook, for their own personal interest."
So Kindles count as reading. Reading a paper newspaper or magazine counts, but I'm guessing that reading the same thing on a screen doesn't count. Reading a bound encyclopedia counts, but reading Wikipedia doesn't.
So, for this study, reading only counts as reading if it was in one of the chosen forms. The word "ple
illiteracy is good for voice input, I mean busines (Score:2)
Announced new product last week, voice input to their LLM.
You are encouraged to be illiterate. It's going to be good for business.
You are aiming for only one book (Score:2)
more widesread? (Score:2)
To be honest, I'm seeing this in other countries. I was an avid reader of fiction, philosophy and technology. Now days it's all on the internet, except fiction, which is on audible. Poor eyesight (I'm 60) pushed me in that direction.
I'm more sad about not writing as much as I did, with pen and paper.
Reading is boring. (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading%2C_Pennsylvania
How could this be (guilty) (Score:3)
a) 21% of the US is functionally illiterate.
26% cannot read at 10th grade level
b) I've been reading for over 10 years that most Americans don't read three books a year.
c) Guilty - between myself, my wife, our kids and grandkids, thousands of Americans don't read a book a year (to lower the average that we skew).
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I'm curious if there are other metrics that are more useful than "number of books read".
Specifically, In the last 2 years, I've read about 8 or 9 real thick epic fantasy/sci-fi books. For the 10 years before that, I doubt I read more than 5 "purely entertainment" books total. Before that (before having kids), i used to read likely 10-20 books a year.
Are we defining a book as a recreational?
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3 books a year? I haven't read a book in nearly 15 years, and it was required for college. There are many things that you can do to waste time, and reading doesn't seem like an interesting choice.
Why would I want to spend all day reading at work, and then go home and proceed to read for "fun"? Even just 3 books a year seems like that'd be performed by someone who REALLY loves to read.
Re: How could this be (guilty) (Score:2)
Dopamine tolerance is a global epidemic (Score:4, Insightful)
Engagement farming doesn't merely sell advertisement.
It habituates cognition to a higher base level of engagement-stimulus, and THAT part works regardless of whether you eventually click through or buy a product. Simply seeing a clickbait headline stimulates the brain even if your higher-level critical thinking recognizes the bait and reminds you not to click the link. Your reaction of eyeroll, disdain, disgust, annoyance as you scroll past it is still a state of neuro-endocrine excitement. And every public and private experience is now being reshaped around engagement.
You simply cannot sustain that throughout entire narratives in long-form novels. If everything is the most important thing, then no thing is important. Narratives need dynamic range. The longer the narrative, the larger the range.
The movie "Run, Lola, Run" was a deliberate exercise in maintaining the constant tension of narrative excitement. But even that film only worked because it was an outlier within a storytelling medium with a wide range of immediacy levels. if every film was at that same intensity, the collective audience would become less interested in film as a medium, even if they couldn't explicitly explain why. It's why narrative arcs like the MCU can't perpetually dominate the field. You can only escalate the "existential threat to the country planet galaxy universe" so far before you escalate yourself into a corner.
You either have to balance the excitement with tedious characterization backstory or throwaway "monster of the week" episodes to preserve the value of the single long-form payoff, or you have to abandon the single long format buildup and shift toward a series of constant lower-level hits which must necessarily be kept short and narratively isolated from each other to preserve their punch.
In this unacknowledged global epidemic of tech-caused dopamine tolerance, we have chosen the latter.
The activity hasn't changed, but the functional payoff of the activity has. It's not that people are reading less, it's that what they are reading is less durable. It has to be, in order to maintain the stim level of each short snippet.
The article says "reading for fun is plummeting". Well, when people scroll 8,000 words on their socials, are they not reading for fun? I'll answer my own question -- no, we are not, because our cognition is being reprogrammed on a massive scale. The nature of "fun" has changed from more of a satisfaction-completion model to a stimulation-maintenance model. Ask yourself whether you ever feel satisfied or fulfilled at the end of the night after interstitially side-scrolling your feeds for two hours. Have you finished it? Do you ever get to any sort of end of the feed and feel that "Ahhhh.... now I see how it all came together" cognitive payoff you used to get from finishing a novel? Even when you stop scrolling, is it because you have reached fulfillment and enrichment, or is it simply because the time has come to force yourself to darken the screen and go to sleep just so you can make it through another day of work?
Stories like this one always result in people upping initiatives to push books on kids, as if access to books is still as rare and challenging and elitist as it was in 1897. In fact, the supply/access to books in 2025 is so pervasive that the monetary value of individual books is approaching zero. Which is why we now have hundreds of thousands of people with a "Little Free Library" in their front yard or church lawn or local park where they literally give millions of books away for free to anyone who wants one.
But access is not the cause of this story. If "reading for fun" is plummeting, it isn't because people are having a hard time finding books, it's because people are having a hard time reading books, because it simply isn't fun anymore. The cognitive nature of "fun" has changed, so when our brains are looking around the local environment for sources of "fun", the "fun" provided by long-form readin
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I don't enjoy reading enough to read your comment.
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I don't enjoy reading enough to read your comment.
I don't blame you. It's a lot. To be honest, I got under-stim boredom halfway through listening to my own inner monologue as I typed it. And I couldn't be bothered to do significant editorial review because I wanted to hit that Submit button as fast as I could to get the hit and speed my way to the next hit.
Try simultaneously binging a shiny-new-and-then-cancelled Hulumazonflix series in order to make my comment neurochemically tolerable (barely). If that doesn't work, binge harder or scroll harder.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't review; in the USA, 67% read â 6th grade level - so would they even notice an error or would they find something flawed that is simply above their skill level?
The reader can fix things to some degree... but will they bother? or maybe an error will get them to focus a little more?
Reading is obsolete (Score:2)
Especially when you can watch 4 minute video clips of influencers on your phone. In all seriousness, if a EMP went off it would do the world a tremendous service
Also a Real Estate Problem (Score:2)
In the US, some people in power see libraries as a waste of money and land because use is generally in decline. In my neck of the woods, a library and community center are being replace with business zoned or mixed use properties, because someone gets to make money moving the public resources elsewhere. Fortunately, the replacements are already constructed and slated to open very soon, but that's only because it's an affluent suburb.
Reading for fun, or Reading Books for fun? (Score:2)
Last book I enjoy? (Score:3)
In grade 4, I had a meeting with my parents and the teacher (Ms Brown), to discuss why I didn't enjoy reading. My mother was crying (of course), and my father was just there, I don't think he really cared. The teacher was very concerned that during "free reading" I would take short form books and read 10 of them, and then summarize them. My teacher honestly thought I didn't know how to read, and was hiding it. I explained in some paraphrased form that I found reading boring, which caused an immediate reaction, that it was my fault that I found it boring.
What did I find boring about it? The waste of engagement, some sloppy, poorly written character spends 100 pages to get nowhere, and you could have just told me in the first page. That triggered an investigation through Special Education because they still thought I was unable to read, but trying to make excuses. The look on Mrs York's face, Special Ed teacher, when I f'ing crushed the entire assessment, was priceless. I ended up by the assessment reading at a grade 12 level in grade 4 (I have no idea how you judge that). I could and can read, I just don't like long format nonsense, and how many of us are in the same boat? How many of us were told we're at fault because we have different preferences?
The question isn't if you enjoy reading, the question is: What do you read, and can you read? If you can't read, that's another topic, but, if you can read, but don't like reading hundredths of pages, when a ten-page summary would have gotten you to the same place, then what's the problem? How many of us read Slashdot every day? How many of us read source X or Y, in the same format? If one paragraph can get me to click a link to a multipage article, why is that not good enough of a metric?
If you enjoy reading, that's wonderful, but why is it an issue when you don't? Maybe you don't dislike reading, you just don't like reading long format styled work.
Why Worried? (Score:2)
This is what they want isnt it ?
A bunch of subservient plebs to rule over who dont ask questions and just accept their lot in life?
When I read a book (Score:1)
One month ago I read a steampunk book.
Well... (Score:2)
When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it?
Gosh, it's been at least... 9-10 hours. I read for fun most nights.
But this story is nothing new - we've been hearing about it for at least a couple decades.
I guess we slashdotters are kinda special! (Score:3)
I mean, here we are, reading slashdot for fun! I mean, I'm pretty sure nobody reads it because they *have* to.
On the other hand, does anybody on slashdot actually read? Or do they just type? :-)
Newsflash (Score:2)
Books are not the only form of reading.
Re: (Score:2)
It's just the most commercialized aside from news tabloids, err I mean "articles".
People's definition of "reading" is changing. (Score:2)
It doesn't take long for me to realize they're conflating "reading" with "listening", since these are books on tape that they're listening to while driving. To them, this is reading- they're obtaining the information found in a book.
It's not reading.
I occasionally listen to books on tape as well, and realized shortly after trying it that I can only handle limited interest topics: basically silly fi
No big deal (Score:2)
<sarcasm>
Heck, only those darned libs read for fun anyways.
</sarcasm>
I like visuals... (Score:2)
... I don't like to read.
good book (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, working until 02:00 or 03:00 in the morning was fairly normal. That was in the 1970s. I don't know what is considered normal now. Probably more.
Mind you, I didn't normally start until about 21:00 - family meal (when Mum wasn't on evening shift), a bit of TV time. Then up to my bedroom to get on with the homework. Get back from the library after school a
Re: (Score:2)
Some of this is the school itself and your community.
The other part is the kids have too much going on sucking up their time. Everybody is so so busy without enough time to do things because everything is competing for our attention like never before in human history. Using addiction and other psychology to steal as much time away from us as they can. It's not TV networks competing for ad viewers like in the past; it is TV vs phones vs games vs social media etc. Less time to read. Less time to be idle and