Everything You Heard About Who Reads Books Is Wrong

“Nobody reads anymore” is the most confident wrong thing people believe about books. The audience is gone, they say. The young especially don’t read. Print is a corpse waiting for the funeral. Every piece of that collapses the second you look at the actual numbers, and the numbers aren’t subtle.

It’s stale, and it’s worst coming from people inside the book business, who should know better. Pundits repeat it because gloom gets clicks.

I suspect some industry people repeat it to excuse a bad season. Every time the line gets passed along, a few more would-be authors decide the audience is gone without ever checking, and I count that as a real loss.

I hear the myth most from authors talking themselves out of a book they’ve wanted for years, and the data looks nothing like the funeral they were promised. Pew has found that about three quarters of American adults read a book in a given year, a number virtually unchanged for more than a decade. Print still dominates every format, and audiobooks are booming on top of it.

Do Millennials Read More Than Anyone?

The generation written off as screen-addicted reads more books than any other living generation, and uses libraries more. They prefer print. That should end the ebook argument. Roughly 72 percent read a print book in the past year against 35 percent who touched an ebook.

These are people who grew up with the internet in their pocket.

Handed every digital option, they reach for paper, It’s a good sign. The story that technology trained them out of books has it backward. They grew up drowning in screens and came back to the book because the book does something a feed can’t. It holds still. It doesn’t buzz, refresh, or beg for attention every few seconds, and for a generation raised on interruption, an object that asks for one long stretch of focus feels like relief.

Are Gen Z readers the new traditionalists?

Now the generation that supposedly can’t look up from TikTok. In a survey across five generations, hardcover was Gen Z’s most-read format at 79 percent. Pew found that adults under thirty read print far more than ebooks, roughly 66 percent against 41 percent. They also post the highest overall reading rate of any age group. When younger readers explain why they love print, the reason they give most is the smell and the feel of the book.

The digital natives want the physical object more than their parents do. A preference for print runs across every generation in the data, from Gen Z up to the Silent Generation. Nobody is walking away from the book. I’d much rather write for the reader who wants the object, because that reader pays for it, shelves it, and remembers the author’s name long after a skimmed download is forgotten.

Is time the real obstacle to reading?

I don’t meet many people who believe nobody reads. I meet the same person constantly. No time to read, four hours a night on a smartphone, an entire series binged over a weekend. The time is there. It’s going somewhere else, and they’ve decided to call that “no time.”

I wrote a whole book about this called Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something, so I won’t relitigate it here. But the distinction matters for an author, because the two problems have opposite consequences. If people couldn’t read, writing a book would be pointless. They can. What they’re short on is attention to spend.

That means your reader hasn’t vanished. Your reader stands in front of a thousand things competing for the same hour. The book that wins the hour is the one good enough to be worth it. That makes it a quality problem sitting on your desk, and you can fix that one. The audience problem out in the world was never real.

What Counts as a Reader?

An American Library Association study found that 43 percent of Gen Z and Millennials don’t call themselves readers.

Sounds grim, until you see what that same group does. They read and buy about twice as many print books a month as ebooks. More than half of the self-described non-readers had still visited a library in the past year. They were reading constantly and refusing the label.

Plenty of people go through books constantly and never think of themselves as the bookish type, because “reader” has turned into an identity label that doesn’t feel like it fits them.

They don’t show up in their own self-reports, and they never show up in the gloomy headlines. Part of the “young people don’t read” myth is a plain accounting error. I think it’s lazy work: people read books while insisting they don’t, and the people writing the obituaries take them at their word without looking at what they do.

I Watched the Real Readers for Years

I spent close to a decade with a camera at Renaissance faires, reenactments, hiking trails, WWE matches, and belly dance shows. I was there for the full run of a local faire and the whole weekend of a distant one. You learn a lot about people watching them for that many hours, and not through a survey, but with your own eyes, on the ground, weekend after weekend.

Those crowds read. The Renaissance faire world is a nerdier, more specialized corner of the culture. It’s full of people deep into Dungeons and Dragons, role-playing, and reenactment. They’re exactly the people who put the phone down and disappear into a world for hours. That’s the exact skill the doom-criers swear the young have lost, the ability to vanish into something for an afternoon. These people do it for fun, in costume, all weekend. They’re not scrolling between rounds.

For more on the Gen Z mindset, see Richard’s interview with Nikhil Raval. They’re reading the lore, the rulebooks, the novels the whole subculture is built on. The appetite the headlines say is dead is alive and loud, and I photographed it for years.

I’m one of them. I used to read a great deal, and it’s dropped off in recent years for the same reason everyone gives. No time. I see that clearly, having just told you the reason is mostly an excuse. When I buy, I buy hardcovers. I like the weight of paper and a hard spine in my hands, and my library is mostly hardcovers, a lot of them signed or limited editions. The physical book is what people who read still reach for, and I’m living proof sitting in a room full of them.

What This Means If You Have a Book in You

The numbers get better still for anyone writing to build authority instead of to entertain. Audiobooks now reach more than half of American adults. Sales were up 9 percent in 2025, according to the Audio Publishers Association. People are reading in more ways than ever, and increasingly they’re reading to learn something, on a commute, at the gym, in the gaps of a busy day.

That’s the exact reader a business book, a how-to, or an expert’s book targets: somebody trying to solve a problem or figure out a field, who picks up a book to do it on a commute or between meetings. I find that encouraging for anyone sitting on real expertise. The audience people told you vanished is still here, and it leans toward the kind of book you’re most likely to write.

Readers exist, in every generation, in numbers that would embarrass the people declaring the book dead, and I’ve run out of patience for the funeral talk. The question that matters is whether your book is good enough, and worth enough of a stretched hour, to be one they finish. That part is on you, and I’d much rather see a writer lose sleep over the quality of the book than over an audience that was never missing.

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From the author

Sell Your Books
Readers are still out there, and the work is reaching them. Sell Your Books is the marketing guide I wrote from a decade of ads, email lists, and launches that worked or failed.

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