Photo by Libby Lewis
By Ruth Dickey, Executive Director, National Book Foundation
In late 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released highlights from its 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. The NEA has been conducting this research periodically since 1982, and the data provides an important window into how, and how much, people in the United States engage with the arts across a whole range of art forms and types of participation.
I’ve spent nearly three decades working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art, leading organizations across the country—from Washington, DC and New Orleans to Cincinnati and Seattle. Now, I serve as the executive director of the National Book Foundation, an organization which approaches its landmark 75th National Book Awards this fall and works year-round to reach readers of all ages through its education and public programming.
For anyone who loves reading and books as I do, regardless of whether you’ve made it your livelihood, there are many reasons for concern with the report’s findings—most notably, the realization that reading rates have been declining significantly over the past decade. In 2022, fewer than half of adults reported reading a book in the past 12 months. Furthermore, only 38 percent reported reading fiction or short stories, a rate that has fallen a worrisome 17 percent over the past ten years.
But digging into the data, I also found reasons for hope: while the NEA’s research did indeed show a decline in reading, there is nuance behind the numbers. Reading books in general did decline from five and ten years before, but when you also include audiobook listening, then the number of adults who engaged with books (through reading or listening) rises to 52 percent, only a slight dip from the 55 percent reported five years earlier. Similarly, when I initially saw that only 38 percent of adults read novels or short stories, it made me deeply sad. But when you also consider listening via streaming, broadcasts, or recordings, the share of adults who engage with this literary form (if we discount creative writing) jumps to 43 percent, which makes me wonder if we are seeing a shift in reading habits rather than a terrifying decline in reading.
Other elements of the data made me feel more hopeful as well. Five percent of adults reported participating in a book group or reading group, and 23 percent reported visiting a public library. Fourteen percent of adults consumed programs or podcasts about books or writers in 2022. I believe a significant component of what encourages any of us to become and remain readers is connecting with other people around books, whether that’s online or in person, through a book group or in conversation with a friend or librarian. And as someone who is lucky to get to talk to readers all over the country, I believe—independent of these data—there are lots of reasons to be hopeful about books and reading.
In my own personal experience traveling with authors who have been honored by the National Book Award to visit communities across the United States, in cities large and small, I see eager crowds of readers who are delighted to talk with writers and with one another. A year ago, I got to travel with Tommy Orange and Tess Gunty to rural Montana in partnership with Salish Kootenai College and Elk River Arts & Lectures. At our event in Livingston, some audience members shared that they had driven over six hours to join us for the event. That readers would be willing to drive six hours to hear from authors struck me as a powerful reminder of the importance and value of gathering around books.
Recent commercial data also buoys my hope: during the pandemic, publishers and bookstores saw record years for book sales. In 2023, Circana BookScan reported 767 million print book sales. Author and editor Lincoln Michel unpacks that number (since BookScan captures only certain times of book sales) to estimate, conservatively, that readers in the U.S. bought at least 900,000 print books in 2023, or over one billion books when including e-books and audiobooks. While Circana BookScan’s print sales figure reflected a drop of almost three percent from 2022, it is still ten percent greater than in the pre-pandemic year of 2019.
Over a billion books purchased is definitely telling us something significant about the power of books today—and that’s a figure that doesn’t even capture books borrowed from libraries or friends. Certainly, any bounce in book-buying that occurred during the pandemic can be at least partially attributed to the fact that books were among the few forms of arts participation that were easily accessible to us all. Still, I think it’s hopeful that the increase in sales has held. Any way you think of it, a billion books is a lot of reading.
Another bright spot for books is the growth and vibrancy of independent bookstores. I lived in Seattle, Washington, when the first Independent Bookstore Day in 2015 featured 19 participating bookstores (and I went to them all!). This year, 28 Seattle stores participated, and the American Booksellers Association reported that “over 200 independent bookstores opened last year in the United States and many existing ones expanded and evolved.” While bookstores are also increasingly weathering challenges from book-banning efforts, it’s incredibly heartening to me that small stores continue to open and engage their communities in unique ways.
I also think we are seeing a range of new ways that readers are connecting to books, and to one another. Beyond the powerhouse book clubs hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager, we are seeing a boom in book clubs from younger celebrities like Dua Lipa, Emma Watson, Dakota Johnson, Emma Roberts, Karah Preiss, and Kaia Gerber. Readers on Instagram have created vibrant “Bookstagram” community around books, and #BookTok posts on TikTok have garnered over 220 billion views. For our 75th anniversary, the National Book Foundation launched its first-ever Summer Reading Adventure, partnering with Bookstagrammers, authors, and readers everywhere to lean into the nostalgia of summer reading programs and raffle off fun prizes, from ice cream to curated book stacks to reusable water bottles and gift cards. Within the first week of the Adventure being live, we had already received over 90 submissions and 92,000 impressions online. While many of us bemoan the ways that screens shrink our attention spans and distract us from so many things, including reading, social media has also provided a wealth of opportunities for readers to find community with one another and to find out about books they may love.
All of this hopeful context lives alongside the fact that for the youngest readers, the pandemic accelerated a dramatic drop in reading for pleasure between age eight and nine, as Dan Kois reports in Slate. Equally alarmingly, book bans have skyrocketed to unprecedented levels: The New York Times shared American Library Association data showing that more than 4,200 titles were challenged in 2023, up from an average of 275 annually in the years before 2021. Moreover, PEN America reported that in the first half of the current school year, there were 4,349 instances of book banning in schools in 42 states across the United States—a sharp increase from just the previous semester, when PEN recorded 1,841 school book bans. As books are under heightened assault, so are schools, teachers, libraries, librarians, bookstores, and booksellers.
The National Book Foundation has launched new programs to support those most directly affected by book banning, like our Teacher Fellowship, which annually celebrates a cohort of teachers for grades 6-12 from around the country and supports their innovative methods to make reading for pleasure part of their students’ school day experience. One of my favorite projects was students in a reading intervention class reading to, and forming relationships with, residents at assisted living facilities in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, via Google Meet.
While reading gaps and book-banning trends are complex and alarming, they also reflect an acknowledgment that books are powerful and worthy of our shared attention. When we are faced with increasingly complicated questions and seemingly intractable challenges, we all need books, and the nuance and depth that fiction, nonfiction, and poetry can provide. For all who care about books, this is a critical time to create more pathways for people to have great experiences with reading—whether that means getting lost in a book, finding a sense of self, finding out about the world, or finding a sense of community.
