TREND WATCH: What’s Happening? New research shows that Millennials read more than other generations and have reversed the long-term decline of youth reading rates. What’s more, when they do read, Millennials generally prefer print books to e-books. And they’re not just reading more for school or work, but also for pleasure—which suggests that Millennials will take their readership habits with them as they age.
Our Take: Print media, long believed to be on the road to extinction, is showing signs of life—and may be saved by the reading habits of Millennials. E-books, on the other hand, may never live up to their billing as a print replacement. Ultimately, these trends cast doubt on predictions that our society will eventually “outgrow” the need for reading and writing.
Millennials take a lot of heat for being too attached to technology. Their high rates of smartphone usage specifically—and their attraction to streaming, gaming, VR, and AR more generally—have spurred countless thinkpieces on how the United States has become a “semi-literate” society in which reading and writing no longer play a serious and central role in our cultural discourse. Many even believe that we’re heading for a dystopian “postliterate” society in which the ability to read and write is eroding with each successive generation.
But hold on. Challenging this provocative narrative is one very significant fact: Contrary to popular belief, Millennials read more than older generations do—and more than the last generation did at the same age. They’re bibliophiles drawing from both the page and the screen.
According to the latest Pew Research Center survey on book reading, 18- to 29-year-olds are the age group most likely to have read a book in any format over the past year. Fully 80% have done so, compared to 73% of 30- to 49-year-olds, 70% of 50- to 64-year-olds, and 67% of the 65+. This age gradient has largely held steady since 2012.
Of course, Millennials are at an age when reading is a necessity. The youngest are still in grade school, after all. The data confirm this: When asked why they read books or any written content in general, Millennials are far more likely than older adults to say it’s for a specific purpose, such as work, school, or research. But they’re also equally likely to read “for pleasure” or “to keep up with current events,” which suggests that their comparatively high rates of readership will endure as they age.
These findings are echoed by a recent report from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). The study examined the narrower category of “literature,” or novels, plays, short stories, or poems not required by work or school. Last year, 43% of 18- to 34-year-olds read literature, a share higher than or on par with nearly every other age group. The only exception is 65- to 74-year-olds (at 49%)—early-wave Boomers well known for their high level of educational attainment and penchant for high culture.
An older NEA report, meanwhile, found that after declining sharply throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds who read literature rose sharply starting in 2002—in other words, when this age group began to be dominated by Millennials instead of Generation Xers.
HOW ARE AMERICANS READING?
Readers today have more ways than ever to access the written word. But the tried-and-true endures: Print books remain by far the most popular format among all age groups. The Pew study found that last year, 72% of Americans read a print book, dwarfing the share who read an e-book (35%) or listened to an audiobook (16%).
And there are no signs that print will be dethroned anytime soon. Adults under 30 are no more likely than their elders to read digital books exclusively (around 6%). A survey of college students by American University professor Naomi Baron found that 92% prefer reading print material to digital material. If the cost of the print and digital copy of a leisure book were the same, 80% would pick the paper version. Even late-wave Millennials and Homelanders are attached to hard copies: In 2014, nearly two-thirds (65%) of 6- to 17-year-olds told Scholastic they’ll “always want to read books in print,” up from 60% two years earlier.
To be sure, young people are consuming plenty of electronic text in the form of their social media feeds, articles, blogs, online magazines, and apps like Hooked. A Pew analysis revealed that Millennials who follow the news are more likely than any other generation to prefer reading it (42%) to watching (38%) or listening to it (19%). But the vast majority of news-reading young adults (81%) prefer to get their fix online; older generations strongly prefer the newspaper. Millennials are not giving up traditional books, but they are trending more toward phones and tablets. The former is for sustained concentration, and the latter is for short-form content.
DRIVERS
Back when Xers were coming of age, some data did seem to support the notion that reading was suffering from generationally driven atrophy. But with Millennials, the data have turned around and point to a generational resurgence in reading.
Why? This generation was raised by parents who—across all incomes and ethnicities—spent a lot more time with their kids, and much of this extra time was spent reading to and with their kids. (We know this from University of Michigan family time diary studies.) Also, as they've grown up and matured, Millennials have stayed in school longer than previous generations did. After backsliding a bit for late-wave Boomers and Gen Xers, young-adult rates of high-school completion and four-year college degree attainment have been hitting record highs for first-wave Millennials. No earlier generation has ever been subjected to so many—and such challenging—written tests, including the SATs and AP exams, and this encourages reading. Also, few earlier generations have been so predisposed to relocate to cities, and urban lifestyles have long been correlated (in controlled studies) with higher rates of literacy and reading.
Older generations might grouse that, well, if Millennials are reading more on average, that's just because so many of them are engaging in simple, easy, short-form reading—but aren't pushing the envelope on hard, complex, lengthy books and articles. More BuzzFeed, but not more Balzac. Yet the data don't show this. Millennials have accounted for a large rise in young-adult readership of elite, highbrow periodicals: A 2012 Pew study revealed that nearly one-third of The New York Times’ readership is between the ages of 18 and 29. The Economist and The Wall Street Journal boast similar figures. Nearly two-thirds of Wikipedia's registered users are under age 35.
As for the preferred length of written content, no one who has waded through Harry Potter can doubt that Millennials can handle long-form content just fine, thank you. And FYI, according to a YouGov survey run in 2011 (celebrating the last Harry Potter movie), 48% of Millennials claim to have read at least one Harry Potter nover and an astonishing 32% have read every novel all the way through.
There are also reasons, moreover, why print reading is withstanding the onslaught of digital reading.
Quite simply, many readers consider physical books better: They’re easier on the eyes, don’t run out of batteries, and offer fewer distractions. Baron says there’s a “physical, tactile, kinesthetic component to reading” that gets lost with e-books. The biggest selling points of e-books—portability and lower prices—aren’t yet enough to get readers to make the switch.
IMPLICATIONS
Print media: Don’t count out book publishers. There’s no question that the traditional arm of the publishing industry—print books sold in brick-and-mortar stores—still faces challenges. Sales of this kind totaled $11 billion in 2015, down from $17 billion in 2007. These sales trends have decimated retailers like Borders (which was forced to liquidate in 2011) and Barnes & Noble (now trading at 63% less than its July 2015 price).
But overall demand for print books continues to rise: Industry tracker Nielsen BookScan reports that sales of print books were up 3% YOY in 2016, marking the third consecutive year of growth.
In 2015, the industry as a whole generated $27.8 billion in net revenue—essentially flat from 2014, but up from $27.1 billion in 2013. If print sales continue to grow, it will be a boon to the private publishers that dominate the industry: Penguin Random House (with 37% market share), HarperCollins (18%), Simon & Schuster (12%), and Hachette (9%).
Print media: rebirth of the mom-and-pop bookstore. Another pillar of the publishing industry—the independent bookstore—has also been defying expectations. Even as big retailers like Barnes & Noble continue to shutter stores, mom-and-pop bookstores are climbing out of their long slump. Their ranks have grown 21% from 2010 to 2015.
Owners attribute the resurgence to superior customer service and book buyers’ desire for a social experience. In the words of one Manhattan bookseller, “My customer is here because they care about more than price…They want to be greeted, they want a sense of community, and they have a craving for culture.”
Online news media: primed for a boom. One area where Millennials have firmly switched to digital consumption is the news. Young adults are far less likely than older generations to follow the news regularly—Pew reports that just 27% of 18- to 29-year-olds follow the news all or most of the time, vastly lower than any other age bracket—but those who do largely read it online.
This preference leaves room for more growth in an already-massive online news market, with high-quality, long-form journalism at one end and easily digestible summaries at the other. It also puts more pressure on social media sites to ensure the stories being shared are accurate, which can be a particular headache nowadays. After the election, Facebook unveiled an array of fact-checking measures intended to crack down on “fake news.”
E-readers: So much for the revolution. A few short years ago, e-readers and e-books were viewed by many as the heir apparent to print books. But after years of steady growth, e-book sales began slowing sharply in 2014. In fact, Nielsen recently reported that sales of e-books plunged 16% YOY in 2016.
Dedicated e-readers are suffering a similar fate. A 2015 Pew survey found that just 19% of adults reported owning an e-reader in 2015, down from 32% the year prior. In fact, a separate Pew study shows that a far greater share of Americans read e-books on their phones, computers, or tablets than on e-readers. This is particularly true when it comes to Millennials: Just 5% of 18- to 29-year-olds read books on an e-reader, compared to 33% who do so on a cellphone.
Society: Don’t buy the postliterate talk. Much of our lives are spent looking at screens: computers, tablets, TVs, and phones. It’s startlingly easy to draw parallels to dystopian fiction like Alduous Huxley's Brave New World or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which characters spend their days surrounded by giant screens. The recent rise of immersive AR and VR technology that promise to take us ever-further from symbolic abstraction (i.e., words and numbers) only accentuates these fears. In most of these dystopias, as writing is abandoned, so is critical thinking or argument—which leads in turn to the disappearance of an informed citizenry and ultimately of the very idea of liberal and democratic governance.
This is a ghastly prospect. Thankfully, however, there seems to be no evidence pointing to the immanent demise of reading and writing. If anything, the data seem to suggest that today's rising generation is pulling in the other direction.
As so often happens, our fear that the “next big thing” will destroy civilization is overblown. Before smartphones and AI were supposed to ruin us, it was TV (the “idiot box”). Before that, it was radio and cinema. And centuries before that it was the printing press itself, which was criticized by clerics for making high culture accessible to the masses. We survived before, and will survive again. For the foreseeable future, the robust reading habits of Millennials all but ensure that our society will remain intellectually curious and that the foundations of liberal democracy will remain secure.
