Does not reading books make Americans more illiterate?

 From The Atlantic, August 2026, The End Of Reading Is Over, by Rose Horowatch.

Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

What does it mean that the majority of Americans don't read books for pleasure? Are Americans increasingly becoming illiterate distracted by sound bites and sensationalized headlines to attact their attention? What does this phenomenon mean for the future of democracy?

When a society shifts from widespread long-form reading to a state where only a small minority regularly engages with books, the consequences ripple across cultural, political, economic, and psychological domains. Data from the American Time Use Survey and recent studies out of the University of Florida and University College London confirm that daily reading for pleasure has dropped to roughly 16% of the population.

While digital media provides a constant stream of "textual fragments"—captions, news bites, and social posts—the loss of sustained, deep reading alters how a society processes information and relates to one another.

Have you read a book in the last year? Are reading a book now? Do prefer fiction or nonfiction? If you read books, what's the best book you have read in the last five years and what made it the best for you?