If you love nothing more than devouring a page-turner in your free time, you're becoming a rare breed. Reading for pleasure among adults in the United States has fallen dramatically in the last two decades. A new study from the University of Florida and University College London, published in iScience, found that leisure reading, or reading for fun, has declined by 40% in the last 20 years.
  • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    the possibility that some people are reading less for enjoyment and more for practical purposes, such as keeping up with online news services.

    So they explicitly exclude reading that isn’t for fun. But then

    There are numerous benefits of reading for pleasure, from improving literacy skills and overall well-being to nurturing the imagination and preventing cognitive decline.

    If those are the goals, why does it have to be reading for pleasure? Isn’t the content of what you’re reading much more important?

  • count_dongulus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    People still read constantly for pleasure. It’s just on their pocket rectangles looking at addictive social apps. Just like how long-form video (cinema) has fallen in favor of bite sized pieces, so too has long-form prose.

    “Reading” is also not a standalone activity like it was decades ago. People engage in all sorts of activities that incorporate reading but aren’t exclusively reading. You might read short stories in an RPG like Skyrim by picking up a virtual book, but if someone asked you what you were doing, you were “playing a video game”, not “reading”. You might be scrolling through a long article posted on Reddit, but you’re not “reading”. You’re “browsing Reddit”.

  • CubitOom@infosec.pubEnglish
    5·
    6 hours ago

    I’m still reading for pleasure. But now it’s interspersed with reading for political revolution and toppling authoritarian regimes.