Jo Reed: Welcome to “Quick Study,” the monthly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts.  This is where we’ll share stats and stories to help us better understand the value of art in everyday life, and I’m co-piloting “Quick Study” with Sunil Iyengar.  He’s the Director of Research & Analysis here at the Arts Endowment.  Hello, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

Jo Reed: Say what now?

Sunil Iyengar: Oh, hi, Jo.  I was just saying to myself the gorgeous opening sentence of that modernist masterpiece, James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which turned 100 this February.

Jo Reed: Oh, I thought that sounded familiar.

Sunil Iyengar: <laughs> I knew it would.  I know you’re a reader, Jo.  I thought this might be a good way to kick off a summary of recent data about reading for pleasure, how much people read and how they consume books and literature in general.  For this episode, I’m not focusing on any single study, but rather dipping into various reports that have come out in the past year or two about how often people read and in what formats.  During the pandemic, Jo, you know, it’s been taken for granted that many people are going out less frequently and maybe confined to forms of at-home entertainment such as movies and TV shows, especially through web streaming.  Some of us have also assumed meanwhile that reading rates may have improved during the pandemic.  Industry analysts, in fact, suggest that print book sales grew over this period and there have been positive reports about the uptake of electronic and audiobooks as well, but I was wondering, what about personal reading habits?  How did they change?

Jo Reed: Okay.  How did they change? <laughs> What’s the first finding you want to share?

Sunil Iyengar: Well, last month, Gallup released findings from a poll they conducted in December of 2020, and they’ve compared those data with similar polls they’ve run in previous years.  They concluded that on the whole, adults in the U.S. are reading two or three fewer books than they did four years ago.  According to the survey, those declines are particularly steep for demographic groups that historically have read more than other groups in the past.  So for example, women, college graduates and older adults, all these groups that tend to read more books on average, saw much sharper drops in terms of the average number of books they read in a year.

Jo Reed: And doesn’t the NEA, don’t we conduct our own surveys about reading?

Sunil Iyengar: Ah, that’s right, Jo.  Every few years we partner with the U.S. Census Bureau to field a nationally representative survey.  It’s called Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which the late, great cultural critic Terry Teachout called “the most statistically reliable study of its kind.”

Jo Reed: Aha.

Sunil Iyengar: <laughs> Now, the problem with talking about multiple surveys in the same breath is that they’re all designed differently.  You know, they ask different questions, they’re conducted at different times.  So the last NEA survey I’m talking about, for example, was back in 2017.  Seems like another epoch.

Jo Reed: And which it was.  Yeah. <laughs>

Sunil Iyengar: But even that survey though showed a drop-off in the average number of books read by the general population, down by about three books per reader since five years previously.

Jo Reed: So is the headline that people on average are reading less?

Sunil Iyengar: Well, not exactly.  I’ve just been talking about declines in the number of books read on average before the pandemic and apparently during it.  But at least two surveys of book reading rates, the Gallup poll I mentioned, but there’s also a Pew Research Center study-- at least two surveys found relatively high percentages of adults reported reading any books whatsoever.  Now, those percentages vary depending on which survey you look at, but both surveys reported no significant changes in numbers compared with previous survey years.  What seems to be happening, based on the NEA and Gallup surveys, is that people who do read are reading less over a four- to five-year timeframe, and this may or may not have much to do with the pandemic.

Jo Reed: And what about the role of ebooks and certainly audiobooks in all of this?  Aren’t their use growing?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, it does seem as if the percentage of folks reading ebooks or listening to audiobooks is growing, at least according to findings released last month from the Pew Research Center.  They concluded that 33 percent of adults use those formats to engage with books, but they also read print books.  They say there’s a sizable group, 32 percent of Americans, who reads only print books.  By contrast, the share who only read book in digital formats is relatively small.  That’s only around nine percent.  So this is actually similar, Jo, to the findings from our own survey back in 2017.  We found that more than half of adults, 55 percent, engage in some form of book consumption, whether reading print books or ebooks or listening to audiobooks.  In fact, when you throw in audio or digital formats into the mix, we see that overall reading rates are much closer to those in the prior survey year.  Further, digital or audio readers who also maybe reading print books now make up a larger share of adults than do print-only readers, according to our survey.  And finally, it turns out that young adults and those who read poetry and graphic novels are more likely to fall into this group, this group of digital or audio readers, than into the group that only reads books in print.  So we’ll be doing the survey again later this year, so it really will be interesting to see what changes.

Jo Reed: So it sounds, if I have this strait, as though digital formats might be helping to prop up reading rates, which is good news, correct?

Sunil Iyengar: Jo, you know I like to complicate things. <laughs>

Jo Reed: Yes, I do.

Sunil Iyengar: So... <laughs>

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Sunil Iyengar: Well, the data we’ve been talking about has been only for adults.  A report from the organization Common Sense Media found that screen reading among children up to eight years old accounted for only about 4 minutes of a total of 2 hours and 24 minutes that those kids spent using screen media on any average day.  Still, the amount of time that they read or were read to has grown slightly, from 29 minutes in 2017 to 32 minutes.  That’s reading of any kind.  Also, it appears that in 2020, African-American children and children from lower-income families, spent more time reading or being read to than people from other demographic groups.  So that’s--

Jo Reed: Okay.

Sunil Iyengar: You know, that’s interesting.  That’s one set of findings.  However, an international meta-analysis conducted last-- or published last March looked at 39 different studies.  It found that when print books and ebooks featured the same content, children eight years or younger were more likely to perform better in terms of story comprehension or vocabulary learning when a print book was used over digital media.  Now, obviously any potential differences between print and digital reading are important to consider in educating the next generation of readers.  One study out of the Stanford Graduate School of Education that I just found saw that rates of reading fluency in the fall of 2020, especially for second and third graders, was roughly 30 percent behind what it would’ve been in a typical year.  Now, that might have something to do with school closings during COVID.  We don’t know.

Jo Reed: Of course.

Sunil Iyengar: Not only that, but U.S. Department of Education assessments from 2019-2020, show that 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds are reading less for fun than in any previous survey year, going back to 1984, as it happens.

Jo Reed: Whoa.

Sunil Iyengar: So when it comes to the interplay between print and digital reading, frequency of reading and reading fluency, it’s rich and complex, not unlike Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

Jo Reed: <laughs> And not unlike Joyce’s “Ulysses,” it’s sure to be the subject of future studies and conversations.

Sunil Iyengar: <laughs> That’s true.

Jo Reed: <laughs> Sunil, thank you.

Sunil Iyengar: Thank you, Jo. <laughs>

Jo Reed: That was Sunil Iyengar.  He’s the Director of Research & Analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts.  You’ve been listening to “Quick Study.”  The music is “We Are One,” from Scott Holmes Music.  It’s licensed through Creative Commons.  Until next month, I’m Josephine Reed.  Thanks for listening.