40% of Britons haven't read a single book in the last 12 months
yougov.co.uk
yougov.co.uk
I do not see how it is possible that the benefit of reading a book has not been subsumed by all of the content we manage to absorb in modern media.
And (depending on what you read, of course), reading can give you serious literacy gainz. And focus too, as another poster wrote.
There is a certain art in reading. Passive reading is of very little use. We must try to realise what we read. [...] we must endeavour to realise the scenes described, and the persons who are mentioned, to picture them in the "Gallery of the imagination."
That's not set in contrast to the TV or computer games of 1894, of course, but in contrast to "reading listlessly or mechanically". So is it really true that the TV, with its greater bandwidth that uses all the senses*, prevents the viewers from imagining things? This is no more than a matter of taste, I think. If you watch The Walking Dead instead of reading it (I've never done either, this is only what I assume) you'll have certain things set in stone, like how a character looks, which might otherwise be flexible in your imagination. But so what? If you then have a daydream loosely based on the same theme then you have complete freedom to introduce whatever elements you like: therefore, don't read a book, take a siesta instead?
*Several of the senses. It doesn't make smells or caress the viewer yet, but you know what I mean.
While there is no doubt plenty of content out there that I am sure is actually stimulating the brain in a healthy way, I wouldn't consider it the norm for either of the media mentioned.
* Knowledge is something I value. Is "useful in life" a metric for its value? This only passes the buck to other values, such as being well fed. I'd rather say that some knowledge is more "useful to the growth of knowledge".
* Elf politics are not fun to the uninterested. Do equations become fun when you're interested? I think so, but only sometimes, somewhat. There are things, culturally, that we'd mention if put in a focus group and asked to itemize fun. Things other than equations, on the whole.
* People, curse them, exist in different problem situations. So elf politics may be statistically more relevant to the problems people in the world grapple with than the equations of motion are. This is different from being deep. But it still means that the elf politics is what those people need, and what we want them to learn about, if they're into it.
* Ideally, we should only be having fun. In practical reality we have to deal with contingent shit we don't like. This is not an effective way to gain great understanding, but that form of learning is "useful" since it pays the rent.
Excuse the inconclusiveness.
Numbing is the opposite of stimulating.
> leaving more tangible value in it
The word value here is ill-defined. I can only think of "entertainment value" which is often sacrificed to make more profit and which books are clearly lacking when compared to other more entertaining things.
Your point being? Over-stimulation in the short term can be numbing in the long term by building up tolerance. And that's assuming that stimulation is somehow a one-dimensional thing and it can only ever be one or the other. The brain is complex, stimulation can go many ways, and simplifying too much is not constructive.
> I can only think of "entertainment value" which is often sacrificed to make more profit and which books are clearly lacking when compared to other more entertaining things.
In the previous reply it was only informational value. Putting that aside, this also reduces something to a single dimension when there is really no reason or benefit in doing so. There is no such thing as The Entertainment just as stimulation does not happen along a single axis.
You are confusing mental stimulation with visual stimulation. We were talking about mental stimulation, not merely entertaining colours and lights. Mental stimulation is something which causes you to think rather than observe.
> this also reduces something to a single dimension when there is really no reason or benefit in doing so
Yes everything is very multidimensional and that conveniently means you never have to explain the concrete meaning of the words you chose to use.
"Books are about information primarily. Then they are about stimulation, of which there is only one type. But not that kind of stimulation." You seem most interested in figuratively listening to yourself talk, because I refuse to believe that your goal is to convince a stranger on the internet that instead of picking up a book they might as well binge whatever is hot on Netflix, which is all I've gathered from your words.
Your comment history seems similarly pessimistic and snarky, and other commenters in sibling threads seem to be getting a similar impression.
I wish you the best. Truly.
Projection.
> Books are about information primarily. Then they are about stimulation
I have repeatedly said that my point is that books provide stimulation but no more than some other media and that it is not the principal benefit of books over said other media (video games primarily). You have been in bad faith for this entire conversation repeatedly failing to grasp this point and then putting words in my mouth which you then use as evidence I contradict myself then gaslighting me when I get annoyed about you doing it. I assumed you were merely not grasping the concept before but this is clearly malicious.
> I refuse to believe that your goal is to convince a stranger on the internet that instead of picking up a book they might as well binge whatever is hot on Netflix, which is all I've gathered from your words.
It's good that you refuse to believe that. Maybe do a bit of reading and thinking to figure out what my actual point is. Here is a useful excerpt from past posts of mine:
> It should be pretty obvious that I think the mental stimulation that is supposedly attributed to books is massively overrated which is evidenced by the fact that more mentally stimulating things do not have those same benefits attributed to them.
> I think the benefit of books is limited to the information you might learn from reading them
Can you figure out from these two quotes which you have access to what my position on books is? Why I think they're better than a Netflix show? Yes you can because you literally did it:
> Books are about information primarily
Then in the next sentence you wonder how I could possibly think that books are better for you than a medium with less information in it. I sorry if you genuinely lack the mental capacity to figure this out on your own, but you can hardly expect me not to be annoyed by it. Especially when you go out of your way to read my comment history to insult me, try a nice little game of "everyone doesn't want to be your friend", and then act all holier than thou about it.
No. I am repeatedly failing to understand why you're trying so hard to make this point. To me. I simply stated my thoughts. I didn't try to prove anything, or ask to be converted or proven wrong on something that I thought was obviously enough subjective.
> this is clearly malicious
Yes, I maliciously tried explaining why I think the way I do after being needlessly challenged in it. I wasn't trying to convince anyone or win some intellectual debate. I still don't understand where the problem is. This comment thread is everything I wish HN wasn't like.
You are still displaying the problem behaviour despite having it clearly explained to you.
A video game has a different pace, different games have very different pace, some will give you a similar experience allowing you to stop and wonder, others will tumble you around frantically.
Books are much better to foster deeper introspection, there's a reason why it's the chosen medium for explaining ideas in detail.
I think you are considering all of this in a very reductive dimension, it's not a line gradient from 0-100, it's a whole plane to be analysed with different axes.
Language is chosen as the medium of communication because there is no real other option, not because writing something in a book makes people think about it more.
> A video game has a different pace, different games have very different pace, some will give you a similar experience allowing you to stop and wonder, others will tumble you around frantically.
Utter nonsense. All games allow you to stop and think because all games terminate at some point, after which you may reflect on the decisions you made. All games have a failure state which provides a lull in action for the precise purpose of allowing reflection. There is little difference between gaming and reading in this regard. A gamer is just as free as a reader to reflect on their experiences, or not to do so. And just as how you cannot reflect while participating in a game, you struggle to reflect on a book while simultaneously reading more of the text.
As someone who gamed a lot in life while also liking to read, utter nonsense. No game has ever gave me the opportunity to re-read the same "page" or sentence on the spot, multiple times in a row, triggering another layer of thought or insight from the same 3-5 seconds. None.
I'm not as free to reflect on the experience while the game keeps going on, the lulls are pre-programmed, not my own pace, I cannot stop mid-sentence and realise something new, a game guides to the completion of that action and stopping mid-way is unnatural, opposed to a book.
It's a very different experience, I really cannot comprehend how you are saying they are absolutely equivalent...
Maybe you just haven't played the right games? Many do in fact allow you to do this. CRPGs usually allow you to take as much time in a conversation or dialog as you want or even replay whole conversations, and Visual Novel games often have an explicit log of every line that you can go back to and read through.
I only play games that are turn-based, or that I can pause. Those are the only real games. The others are like fairground rides. Maybe once in a while I'll play pinball or something but it's a whole other category (and story-laden adventure games are another category again).
You shouldn't claim to know anything about games if you have never willingly replayed a level of one after completing it. Or even replayed a level full stop, as the better analogy here is one where you fail to fully grasp a passage on the first try just as one might fail to complete a level on the first try. In fact, the way you seem to think a game is entirely pre-programmed and moves independently of your interaction with it makes me wonder if you've played any games at all. Which game were you thinking of when you wrote this post? Everything you mentioned has very obvious analogues in gaming.
You are either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what I said, in either case you are wrong.
> You shouldn't claim to know anything about games if you have never willingly replayed a level of one after completing it. Or even replayed a level full stop, as the better analogy here is one where you fail to fully grasp a passage on the first try just as one might fail to complete a level on the first try
Of course I did, and that's why I'm stating with absolute certainty that this isn't at all close to my relationship and experience with books.
> Which game were you thinking of when you wrote this post? Everything you mentioned has very obvious analogues in gaming.
I'm thinking of games with any kind of history/lore ranging from titles I'd consider more similar to books such as "Day of the Tentacle", "Full Throttle", to the modern incantations like "Last Of Us", passing through adventure/action games like "Castlevania", "Metroid", "Ultima" series, "Elder Scrolls" series, "Final Fantasy" series (played only VII, VIII, Tactics but they all follow the FF formula), "Legend of Zelda" (played all the SNES/N64 and the Switch ones), and also modern incantations like "Dark Souls", "Metal Gear Solid" (played 1 and 2), so on and so forth, just a brief list of what I'd like to mention to shutdown the argument that I don't know what I'm talking about.
None of these games were ever the same experience as a book, they are their own media, with its own strengths but never, ever really like my experience with books.
Maybe try a puzzle game (sokoban games provide a similar experience to the one you describe), or a multiplayer one. It seems your experience with games is fairly limited, and what you've done here is basically the equivalent of listing a bunch of Marvel movies to "shut down" the argument that you don't know much about cinema. Or for a more topical example, listing the Harry Potter books and Tolkien as proof you are well read.
> None of these games were ever the same experience as a book
Well it's a good thing we're talking about "mental stimulation" rather than "giving you the same experience as a book". There are obvious differences between games and books. Games have a controller, books often do not. Games often have different colours in them, books rarely do. I don't see much productive in you simply telling me that a game is different from a book, I know this. It is the core of my argument. That a game is different from a book, provides a greater level of mental stimulation, and yet doesn't have the supposed mental benefits that reading does, therefore these benefits are likely overstated in books. I also hypothesise that observed benefits of reading come from ideas presented in specific books rather than the mere act of reading any text. Any difference between games and books is only relevant to this discussion as it relates to those ideas.
Different media affect and engage us in different ways/modes, and reading is a process that requires a particular set of skills that is different vs watching TV.
Much like listening to music with one's eyes closed vs reading the notation – one might get a sense of the composer's intent, structure, theme, emotion, etc. from both, but there are major qualitative differences in the two media.
as other said:
- focus is deeper on a book, even more on paper (your brain can only turn pages) - most social media or web content doesn't describe landscapes, feelings, humans thoughts. due to various mental issues, I could clearly feel how reading novels about humans change your brain state in way other text don't.
the whole tech era is wrong on this, a lcd with characters is not the same as a book
You might say that it's my "escape from reality".
But.. well.. who cares? I don't think that my unending love for Dungeon Crawler Carl is somehow making me a better person.
I think that something much more relevant is how much exercise people get, how many people do weekly sports or exercise for example? And that's something that the Hacker News crowd in particular will likely score worse on then how many books they read per year.
Audio books are fine but actual reading is important too. The "escape from reality" is not relevant part but being served without doing the work is.
I disagree that audiobooks are not a substitute to actual reading, with respect to your point regarding the medium itself. Perhaps you have a point regarding the kind of material and listening that one can multitask/commute while listening. But stories were first transmitted orally and provoked imaginations and creativity with the same limited information all the same, and continue to. It is arguably the more primitive and natural medium for storytelling but that for a period it was only economical to disseminate them very widely by writing. Whatever beneficent mental work goes into reading fiction especially I believe happens in aural listening.
If on the other hand you argue that it is the work that goes into interpreting the written word visually, I would say that the same work happens outside of fiction as well, including all the lowbrow and instrumental reading that we do all the time nowadays.
Whereas reading requires a person's vision to be focused on the book, and therefore precludes driving, and most other activities. The book therefore receives the readers full attention, it's not background music to the commute.
The difference in attention is significant.
Given all of that, I don't think the "reading a book" metric is really significant in measure how thoughtful society is, given that most books mentioned here are vacuous make believe. Entertainment is fine, but reading "Pink Unicorns Fly Through Hyperspace" isn't expanding anyone's awareness of the world.
But I do abhor elitism - whether cultural or intellectual. I reject the idea that 'high culture' defines intelligence or value, and by extension, I question whether we can truly measure the intellectual level of a society based purely on how many (or which) books they read.
You're right that physical exercise is somewhat tangential to this discussion. My point wasn’t to distract but to challenge the idea that book-reading is the sole meaningful metric for personal or societal development.
If you haven't, I highly recommend Orconomics as well. J. Zachary Pike is a masterful writer.
After checking it includes audio books which might explain it, but still... 60% of Britons have read/listened to a book in the last year? I doubt it.
A picture of a rock might or might not provoke any particular thoughts about rocks in the viewer.
But if I write anything more than the purely descriptive "there is a rock" then I have conveyed some sort of thought about the rock or rocks in general, and at the very least you have been introduced to my thought, and very likely you have also reacted with some thought of your own. And the mechanical process of reading gave you the time and venue for that to happen.
Even if I do try to be purely descriptive, it's impossible to seperate my perception from the output. I can only describe what I noticed and considered noteworthy. I litetally cannot write the equivalent of a photograph of a rock, but can only write my thoughts about that rock.
The photograph may contain more data, but no opinions and no understandings. The viewer can possibly have no thoughts at all about it, and not actively notice most of the data, or the significance of various bits of the data, but the reader must have at the very least the thoughts of the writer, and it will be almost impossible not to have some sort of thougts of their own in reaction to reading the writers.
Other things also provoke thought, including video games. But I only asserted "more".
An incurious person can fail to think about anything at any time.
And you fail to think about games. Interesting what you say about yourself.
It is a contrived exception because you have to pick a special video game and a special book to make it work, and the example will not hold when picking 100 books at random and 100 games at random, and that's even granting that the cherry picked example even holds, which I actually deny.
The tone of your post suggests you're refuting this wholesale. I think you're wrong, reading books makes you smart(er) at least by expanding your vocabulary and widening your understanding of the world by putting in front of you experiences from people that are not exactly like you.
You're offering video games as an alternative, but people that invest a lot of time in playing video games as opposed to reading, usually do it with terrible games, where the lesson to learn is that life is expendable, enemies must be stopped at all costs, genocide is valid as long as you're the main character, etc. Games as art form rarely engage people in the same way as mass murder types of games. What are the sales numbers of Disco Elysium vs Call of Duty?
And yes, pulp exists in writing too, probably to an even greater extent, but at the same time the peaks are higher and, in my opinion, the benefits, as subjective as they may be, greater.
You make an almost credible post but then totally undermine it with this statement. It's rather like saying Looney Tunes is bad because the intended lesson is that you should set your cat on fire.
My problem is not that games make kids shoot schools, is with the fact that games in order to "be fun" and have people play them need to follow this recipe in the first place. The violence is probably intellectually understood as "wrong" by the large mass of players, but in my opinion it still desensitizes and erodes normal reactions against it to a level that should not be acceptable.
I can't find their methodology anywhere. Given some of the results,
I expect:
- This is based on self reported unverified answers, probably overinflated in terms of how many books actually read because people don't like to be perceived as a 'non-reader'.
- potentially also a selection bias? How were interviewies selected? Ho random was the selection process? Did they randomly phone people (would this count as fieldwork)? Were they standing outside a library or uni? Did they hand out 10.000 forms and put up a dropbox?
As a student I worked for some of those companies to which 'fieldwork' eas outsourced. There was not much supervision besides "get back 150 filled out questionairs today".
https://yougov.co.uk/about/panel-methodology
They have a panel.
I practically don't have the time to read for leisure - tech moves very quickly, and that takes up the bulk of my thinking/study time/energy
Same for fiction. I don't want 10 pages of world building. I want immersion. "The Sun Also Rises" would be miserable at 10 pages. Nobody is trying to communicate an idea in this case, they're communicating an aesthetic, a "vibe" or a mood. 10 pages of that and on to the next thing? Sure, if that's your medium, but the medium is the message, and the book is a unique medium for communicating big ideas, immersive worlds, and extensive moods and aesthetics. I sure hope the medium for those things isn't out of date or the world will seem a little shallow.
I do intersperse with a pile of non-fiction, mostly history, which I march through about a chapter at a time.
I’m not sure it’s that much more virtuous to read a few Dan Browns or John Grisham per year though?
I've found watching a tv series and reading a book are very similar. They both share two key issues:
First reason there are good and bad books, and finding the good ones is really difficult for me. Just like with a tv show, I will stumble on a book and read it, it will be a great book that really moves me and makes me think. Now hooked on books, I will look for more books. I will read one after the other. I will eventually find one thats tiresome or "bad". I will fight through it. But then when the next book is also not great, I will stop entirely. Exact same happens to me when watching tv shows (last great one was succession).
---
Second reason is just getting sick of the medium in general. Like with many things in live I just get sick of reading. It also happens to me when I regularly watch tv shows, at some point I get sick of the activity all together and stop for a few months (or years).
The lack of free time in modern society is the source of so many of our problems. Historically, people had way more leisure and down time. The amateur anthropologist/youtuber Stefan Milos mentioned this in one of his videos recently when talking about human rituals.
I'd really like to know how much time folks are spending on their phones instead of doing something that would count as leisure or free time activities. It's not hard to read for 10-30 minutes but I'd wager most people wouldn't bother when they can scroll for that same amount of time, especially in public. It's way easier to shove your face into your phone in public than to read a book. I find myself doing that all the time, so I'm not trying to take anyone down.
Remember "being bored" as a kid? Having nothing to do so you'd make up stuff with your friends? Good times.
I do not like to read from screens. The next book I was keen on, from the Culture series, arrived from Amazon (ordered new) with signs of heavy water damage, making it unwieldy to read. I have been in a limbo of not wanting to deal with that and not wanting to be wasteful by ordering another one. There are also more non-fiction books that have been in various stages of completion for more months than I would care to admit.
However, while I like books, I wonder if in the golden age of information (now drawing to a close) it should be expected that fewer books would be read without a decrease in literacy or education: for a while in somewhat recent past non-fiction books used to be the only way of obtaining a wide variety of information, a lot of which is now covered by numerous other sources (blogs, references, and so on).
This is not necessarily unique for Britain and feels like more of a world-wide trend. Of course, this can be partly explained by women reading a lot of romance books, I think it could be a worrying trend for the future. Reading is an important aspect of a man's life. Sitting down and being forced to uninterruptedly focus on a singular task is exactly the kind of thing that is missing from many lives of young men.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal
Why can't it be meditation, programming, working out, listening to music, fishing, mountain climbing, going for a walk, or something similar?
Why the focus on reading in particular, as if it were some great act? What if someone only reads books written for the MAGA crowd, is that something that many young men are missing in their lives?
The devil is really in the details: not all books are created equal, because simply reading a random fiction book doesn't automatically convey moral or intellectual superiority. Elucidation through deliberate intellectual effort combined with a healthy information diet is necessary beyond simply cargo cult pantomiming one habit or another.
>Overall, just over half of U.S. adults, 54% or 130 million people, are deficient in basic literacy.
Over 40% of Americans don't read at a 6th grade level.
This probably plays into the class divide, my wife hates reading (for pleasure) she says that comes from having to read a lot at work. I imagine a lot of people read quite a bit but maybe have less interest in reading in their free time for entertainment.
I just don't get much time where
* It's a decent block of time
* I won't be distracted or need to do something else
* I want to be alone
* I can be alone
* I'm mentally engaged enough
* I'm not trying to fit something else in like exercise
If you include kids books it's 1-2k but they're not really the same.
Adults only have so much time to read, that you need to do it at an expense of other important things.
I want to own my books, and ebooks are a Wild West of DRMs. I don’t trust them.
... and then by size. It's the most aesthetically pleasing for me, genuinely.
What are some possible causes?
everybody knows that showing too much interest in a story kills it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGphsPOHi2M
Ernest Cline has a lot more to say than most book authors...
"Some of the monkeys read Nietzsche"
"The monkeys shave the hair off of their bodies in blatant denial of their true monkey nature"
"The monkeys are polluting and raping their planet like there's no tomorrow"
"The monkeys like to pretend that everything is Just Fine"