It is not the same to read much than reading well, just as not all books are the same. Some of these conclusions can be taken from a series of recently published statistics and that analyze reading habits both in the United States and Spain. Interestingly, trends in Spain seem to contradict those of the rest of the world, but … is positive news?
Global Descent. Antonio Ortiz counted on his Newsletter ‘Causes and Azares’ that there has been a global descent in reading habits. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US, the time dedicated to reading for pleasure fell 23 minutes in 2003 to 15 minutes in 2018, 40%, and the trend continued to reduce up to only 16% of the population that reads daily in 2023, as explained by the New York Times in Spanish. In the United Kingdom, the National Literacy Trust He found that in 2023 only 47% of adolescents said they regularly read for enjoyment, lowering 60% in 2005.
The Iberian contrast. In Spain, the data is more positive: the 2024 reading habits barometer of the Ministry of Culture of Spain indicates that 65.5% of readers do so by leisure, which represents the highest percentage in historical series. And 70.3% read books in general. In addition, due to age of age, the 14 to 24 -year -old represents the largest readers (82.1%), while the indices fall in over 55 years, indicating that a reading habit in young people is being found in young people who will give a more reading population. Does that perspective make sense, are hopeful data for reading in Spain?
Reasons to doubt. These data may be inflated by social bias: when responding to surveys, people tend to overcome activities considered “educated” such as reading, and subtracts those perceived as “banal”, such as watching television and spending time with the mobile. And why do we doubt? Because the social prestige of Reading is still valid (as the controversy reflected with María Pombo), and recent measurements, such as Eurobarometer 2025, talk that Spain is one of the European countries where more people link reading with being “more cultured and intelligent”, which probably explains some inflation in the answers.
Shorter phrases, simpler readings. For example, as Ortiz also points out, ‘The Economist’ has detected that the vocabulary and grammatical structure of the best-sellers They have been simplified between the thirties and today: the phrases are 30% shorter due to the least number of subordinate sentences. And there are more: academic research such as those of the COH-Metrix project of the University of Memphis have measured that the average readability of current best-seller is equivalent to the level high school junior (16-17 years), while in the sixties and seventies it was closer to the initial university level (COH-Metrix).
On the school level, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that the active vocabulary of written adolescents has been reduced compared to decades ago. And, finally, essays such as ‘Reader, eats Home’ by Maryanne Wolf warn about how fragmented reading in digital media impoverishes deep reading capacity.
We presume more than we read. If we combine these data with others, which tell us that the UNESCO He estimates that only 5% of the population reads a book per month or that 40.3% of Spaniards declare never read or almost ever, a constant figure in the last decade, we find a certainly contradictory situation. We like to presume that we read, but they are perhaps fattened by our own perception. And in addition, they are readings of a complexity much lower than that of a few decades ago. With readers like that, who needs María Pombo.
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