Reading a novel: attention and habit

Counting readers is harder than it looks

Pew Research Center surveyed 1,502 US adults between 25 January and 8 February 2021 and asked whether they had read a book in the previous twelve months in any format, whether print, e-book or audio. Roughly a quarter of American adults (23%) said they had not, a share the centre notes is identical to the figure for 2014. That implies that about 77 per cent had read at least one book, a calculation made for this guide and not a figure the source states.^[1]

A British survey by The Reading Agency asks a different question. As reported by The Bookseller in July 2024, it found that half of UK adults do not regularly read, and 24 per cent of 16 to 24 year olds say they have never been readers. Regular reading and reading no book in twelve months are different measures, so the American and British figures cannot be compared directly. The part of the article that could be read, as it is paywalled, did not state the sample size or wording of the survey, so its figures should be treated with caution.^[2][1]

Children and young people

The National Literacy Trust's 2025 Annual Literacy Survey gathered 114,970 responses from children and young people aged 5 to 18 in early 2025. It reports that reading enjoyment among 8 to 18 year olds reached 32.7 per cent, which it describes as the lowest in 20 years, a fall of 36 per cent since 2005. Daily free-time reading among the same group fell to 18.7 per cent, a decline of nearly 20 percentage points since 2005. Among 5 to 8 year olds, 44.5 per cent read daily, down 3.4 points in a year.^[3]

The report also records differences between groups. Girls read daily more often than boys, with the gap at 6.2 percentage points, the widest since 2023. Among children not receiving free school meals, 19.4 per cent read daily, compared with 15.8 per cent of those who do. The fall in enjoyment over the last year was especially steep among primary-aged children and boys, particularly those aged 11 to 16. These are survey responses about enjoyment and frequency, and they do not tell us whether the children surveyed read novels.^[3]

An international comparison for teenagers

The Australian Council for Educational Research has analysed what 15-year-olds reported in the OECD's PISA study, which asked students how much time they spent reading for enjoyment in 2000, 2009 and 2018. Between 2000 and 2018 the share of Australian girls who did not read for enjoyment rose by 11 percentage points, to 36 per cent, and for boys it rose by 13 percentage points, to 53 per cent. Agreement with the statement I read only if I have to rose from 30 to 46 per cent among girls and from 46 to 61 per cent among boys.^[4]

These are Australian figures. The ACER article does not give OECD-average figures, and this guide could not open the OECD's own PISA 2018 tables, so it makes no claim about other countries, including the UAE. The result is useful mainly as a second example, alongside the British data, of survey respondents reporting less reading for enjoyment among teenagers over two decades.^[4]

Attention, paper and screens

A 2018 meta-analysis by Delgado, Vargas, Ackerman and Salmeron, published in Educational Research Review, compared reading comprehension of comparable texts on paper and on digital devices in studies from 2000 to 2017. It included 38 studies with between-participant designs and 16 with within-participant designs, with 171,055 participants in total, and found a small advantage for paper, with a Hedges g of minus 0.21 in both designs.^[5]

The advantage was not uniform. It grew when reading time was constrained, it was consistent for informational texts or a mix of informational and narrative texts but not for studies using only narrative texts, and it increased over the years. Because the narrative-only studies did not show the advantage, the meta-analysis does not show that reading a novel on a screen is worse than on paper. It measured comprehension in experiments, not enjoyment or long-term habit.^[5]

What the evidence does and does not show

Taken together, the sources show that, in the surveys cited, reported reading enjoyment and frequency among young people have fallen, that self-reported non-reading among US adults was unchanged between 2014 and 2021, and that a British survey reports half of adults not reading regularly. They do not establish why. None of the sources opened tests a cause such as phones, schooling or time pressure, and a change in a survey figure is not by itself a finding about cause.^[1][3][2][4]

Nor do the sources measure novel reading specifically. Pew counts any book, the National Literacy Trust counts reading in free time, and the Reading Agency figure concerns regular reading. The paper-versus-screen meta-analysis concerns comprehension tests and finds no consistent gap for narrative texts. A cautious reader can conclude that reading for pleasure is reported as less common among the young, and that adult figures depend heavily on how the question is asked.^[1][3][2][5]