By Shane Rodgers
I hate to be the one to have to declare it, but reading for recreation may be in a terminal decline. And the thought terrifies me.
There is a quote from the Dr Seuss book I Can Read With My Eyes Shut that has long lingered in my head:
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
I have no doubt that this is true. But, as the old saying goes, you can lead a child to books but you can’t make them read (or something like that).
Sadly, the signs have been there for a while. Plenty of studies over the past 20 years have painted the picture.
A 2023 survey of 71,400 children and young people by the UK-based National Literacy Trust found that fewer than one in three children aged eight to 18 read daily for enjoyment.
This was 26 percent lower than the 38 percent recorded when the survey began in 2005.
Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics released new time-use figures that starkly highlight the generational reading decline.
While nearly half of people aged 75 and over still read daily for pleasure, this fell as low as 10 percent for male teenagers and men in their early twenties.
The generational decline could not be starker.
The so-called interwar generation have a daily reading habit of 47.4 percent and from there it drops – Baby Boomers 30.2 percent, Generation X 17.7 percent, Millennials 14.1 percent and Generation Z 11.2 percent.
On those numbers, the next generational grouping will barely trouble the scorer.
If you consider that reading is an inherently good thing to do, there are some crumbs of hope in the figures for teenagers and 20-somethings.
While only a small minority of Generation Z do any reading, the ones that do tend to be super readers – more than two hours a day.
Maybe we need a super reader breeding program to preserve readers for future generations.
And, of course, the reading includes books (print and electronic) magazines and newspapers. The figures exclude social media posts, messages and texts.
Perhaps this generation is still reading lots, just in tiny chunks. Future generations may only read in text-speak.
Such is the nature of human paradox, the ABS figures coincided with some publicity around claims that there is oversupply of books in the global market.
The Semafor news agency released a table last week outlining how many book titles are registered in each country,
The United States has a whopping 39.9 million books registered based on the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) figures.
This is followed by the UK (7.9 million), Germany (5.6 million) and South Korea (3.8 million).
On any measure that is a truckload of books. It would take years just to read out the titles, much less read the books themselves.
In fact, I read once that if you read out the titles of every book ever written it would take 14 years.
Last week literary podcaster Maris Kreizman declared in an article on the Literary Hub website that the world had too many books.
“As a reader, I’m constantly overwhelmed with new material, and I know I’m not alone,” she said.
“And this is before we factor in how the market is flooded with AI-generated ripoffs for sale on Amazon.
“I’ve spoken to in-house editors and publicists who are more inundated than ever, unable to give each of their titles the attention they deserve.
“That leaves consumers faced with a morass of seemingly unvetted choices, presented to us through useless algorithms and very little human intervention.”
So, the deal is we have too many books, and a declining base of readers to read them. What could possibly be wrong with that picture?
And what will less reading mean for humans? We have already outsourced our memory to Google and our iPhones.
We are about to outsource pretty much everything else that requires thinking to Artificial Intelligence.
What will that leave our brain to do? I’ll let you know once ChatGPT tells me.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”
George R.R. Martin
Shane Rodgers is a writer and business executive. His books include Worknado – Reimagining the way we work to live and Tall People Don’t Jump – The Curious Behaviour of Human Being (Yes him and 40 million others).
