Picture the last time you sat down with a book and read for an hour without once checking your phone. If that feels like a memory from another life, you are far from alone. In 2015, 58% of UK adults described themselves as regular readers. By 2024, The Reading Agency's national survey found that figure had slipped to 50%, while the share who say they have never been a regular reader at all, 15%, had almost doubled in under a decade.

Behind the headline sits a quieter story of people who simply drifted away. Around 35% of adults are what the charity calls lapsed readers: people who used to read regularly and stopped. Among 16 to 24 year olds, nearly a quarter say they have never been regular readers. Yet it is not a lack of appetite. Most people say there are plenty of things they want to read, and in 2025 55% admitted they read less than they plan to. Ask why, and the answers are familiar: no time, a phone within reach, and a mind that struggles to settle.

There is some good news. The 2025 survey put regular readers back up at 53%, and the same research found that 77% of people who reject the label "reader" still read text in other forms, from news to messages. But skimming a headline is not the same as being carried away by a story. Across the EU the picture is similar: Eurostat found that only 52.8% of people aged 16 or over had read a book in the previous twelve months in 2022, with women more likely to have done so than men.

Children are the real worry. The National Literacy Trust's 2026 survey found that only around 36% of young people in the UK enjoy reading in their free time, a small rise after years of decline, and 2026 has been named a National Year of Reading. Meanwhile, silent reading parties, where strangers gather in bars to read side by side without speaking, have become a small but real trend in European cities, and online "reading streak" challenges turn a solitary habit into a kind of sport. Whether that is a genuine revival or a hobby for people who never stopped reading is the awkward question underneath it all: if reading really does build attention, empathy and imagination, can we afford to let it become optional?