The Stack reading habits report

A moral panic is brewing. In the UK and US, anxious journalists and disappointed commentators are worrying loudly about a new age of idiocy that’s coming for us all, because we’re not reading enough.

Times journalist James Marriott started the ball rolling in September last year, when he published a piece on his Substack announcing that we’re living through The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. He followed that up with a short series on Radio 4 earlier this year, which asked what would happen if we stopped reading. And in September the lit will really hit the fan when his new book comes out, titled The New Dark Ages – The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society. But of course he’s not the only one concerned by the decline, and the August issue of The Atlantic hit shelves carrying a cover story declaring, The Age of Reading is Over.

I find all this extremely unsettling. I run an independent magazine club, which depends on people wanting to read for fun, so clearly the drop is not good news for me and my business. But more than that, it doesn’t feel quite right. The death of reading sounds uncannily similar to the death of print, which is another issue that’s prone to over-simplification, and which I’ve written about in the past.

Now I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a problem – it seems pretty clear that all around the world, people are reporting that they’re spending less time reading for pleasure. But I don’t think it’s useful to have an educated elite shaking their heads in dismay at the fecklessness of young people today, and presaging the end of society as we know it.

So instead I decided to ask people about their reading habits, to see if I could sketch in some of the detail that’s getting lost amongst the headlines. I put together a survey asking people how much they do or don’t read, and how they feel about it, and in the end we had just under 450 responses. At this point I need to acknowledge that our audience is largely made up of people who love magazines, so while we tried to solicit responses from as wide a group as possible, we should assume that our sample is going to include people who are more into reading than most. But by going deep with this one group, I think we’ve come up with some fresh ways of thinking that shed new light on the overall decline.

Print vs digital

One of the thorniest debates in publishing over the last 20 years has been the battle between print and digital, so I wanted to get an idea of whether that could be affecting the ways that people read. Virtually everyone we surveyed agreed that there’s a difference between the formats, with 97% of respondents saying that reading in print feels different to reading on a screen. And when we asked people how the two feel different from each other, we tapped into some interesting distinctions.

Lots of people spoke about either print or digital giving a better reading experience, and when respondents focused on practical benefits, the two were fairly evenly split. For example, some people noted that reading in print is easier on their eyes, allowing them to read in comfort for longer. Others reported that they find it easier to hold a digital device than a book or magazine, so they can read at length without straining their hands.

But there was also another type of better reading experience, characterised by more abstract advantages. They’re harder to pin down, but they revolve around the idea that a wide range of emotional or cognitive benefits are somehow related to the physical object itself. And the people who spoke about these more abstract benefits overwhelmingly preferred print over digital. It’s as if, somehow, the experience of interacting with print enhances the experience of reading itself.

For example people reported that they can focus better when they read in print. They said that reading in print is more relaxing; more pleasurable; more refreshing: “Your eyes relax, mind opens, and you get mentally sucked into the page. The hard surface of the screen does not allow for this immersion.”

It seems that digital is appreciated entirely for its practical advantages, and of course we all know there are plenty of those. Digital is faster, cheaper, and more flexible than print; it’s infinitely shareable; and taking your phone out of your pocket is way more convenient than hunting down an actual book or magazine. And yet when it comes to that more abstract, ineffable pleasure that can come from reading, it seems that all the strengths of digital end up becoming weaknesses, as practicality crowds out everything else.

One respondent summed it up particularly well: “Reading on a screen feels more like a standardized, optimized experience. It’s flawless, perfectly ergonomic, and highly efficient – but also quite dull. I use it to consume information rather than to actually read a book.”

Pursuing reality

Another common theme in the responses revolves around print being somehow more “real” than digital. Lots of people use the term, and yet it’s hard to pin down exactly what it means. Taken at face value of course it’s nonsense – a tablet or phone is clearly every bit as real as a book or a magazine. So what is this elusive realness referring to?

Looking closely at the answers, it seems that “real” can be shorthand for several overlapping ideas. Following on from the abstract advantages above, there’s an idea that print is real because it somehow allows readers to form a close relationship with the print object: “More focus, more depth, more intimate, more real.” And there’s the idea that print is real because it exists as an object in the world, whereas screens are made to be transient: “It’s real, words on a screen that you just scroll through are not.” Similarly, there’s the idea that once you’ve finished reading a piece of print, you’re left with an artefact of the experience: “Nothing compares to reading a real book! Feel more connected, tangible and engaging. I like collecting books and magazines so it’s a visual reminder of what I’ve read.”

There’s also the idea that print is real, because digital is more likely to be artificial in some way: “It feels less substantial, like it’s fake. Something about reading in print feels real, it feels enriching. Reading in print is an act of commitment, a decision and intentional.” And there’s a version of realness that defies empirical definitions to tap into something more holistic: “Grounding, magical, poetic, real, the way it should be, comforting, stimulating.”

Again, I find it striking that nobody used words like this to explain why they prefer reading on a screen. In the early days of the iPad, Apple spent a lot of money telling everyone that their new device was magical, and it genuinely did seem to herald a brave new world of communication. But in the years that followed, that magic has gradually been obscured by anxieties over surveillance capitalism and soaring screen times, and now all we’re left with is a pragmatic appreciation of the screen’s impressive functionality. By contrast, print’s limitations make it more human, more emotionally resonant, and more fundamentally part of us, and that’s a powerful position to occupy.

It seems to me that this difference could be playing a part in the overall decline of reading. Our respondents told us that they read on screens more often than they read in print, so it could be hugely significant that the majority of reading today misses out on the more abstract and emotionally potent benefits that would otherwise enhance and elevate the experience.

Reading for fun

But of course we’re an independent magazine club, so we’re not just interested in print – we’re interested in print magazines. We asked people whether reading a magazine in print feels different to reading a book in print, and again the response was clear, with 75% of people saying yes.

We also asked people why they read magazines, and the top three responses were: “I like the design” (76%); “They’re interesting” (74%); and “I like the photos / illustrations” (66%). These answers clearly show that people are reading magazines for more than just the words, and that’s not surprising. Magazines have evolved over the last 300 years to make it easy and fun for people to read, and whereas the layout of the novel, for example, has remained essentially the same since the days of Daniel Defoe, magazine makers have constantly sought to innovate and improve upon the ways their pages are presented.

Engravings, then illustrations and photographs were all introduced with the aim of making the page more attractive and drawing readers in. Likewise headlines, standfirsts, pull quotes, and all the other devices we now take for granted were created to catch the reader’s eye and guide them through a story. Given the enormous importance of graphic design to the overall magazine product, it’s not surprising to see that two of the top three reasons for reading magazines are related to their attractiveness.

Design plays a big part in the ways that people read magazines too. Whereas books are always read front to back, magazines encourage a less rigid approach: “It doesn’t have to be linear, you can skip ahead or go back. A magazine can tell a story in a range of different ways in one issue. There is more diversity with a magazine, it feels more playful, more immediate.”

One of the most common terms used was “fun”, with people describing them as more conversational, more entertaining, and less academic than books. But people also spoke about magazine design allowing for more detail and complexity: “I think of reading a book in print as slowly consuming it. With a magazine, I almost never feel like I’ve fully consumed it – there’s always a detail in a picture, a pull quote, or an editorial choice that I have yet to consider.”

And there’s that mysterious, indefinable sense of magic again: “It feels more magical. I think the mix of words and pictures create an experience that feels a bit more.”

By the book

But for all that people say they love the freedom and exploration that magazines afford, there is also a sense of anxiety lurking in the background of the answers. Because if you can just dip into a magazine for a quick snack, maybe that’s not very good for you? There’s a theme in the responses that worries about the quality of writing in magazines: “Magazines feel less important somehow. Like low level reading”, or their consistency: “a good article is quickly gone, replaced by a mediocre one”.

Of course there are plenty of bad books out there, and I can think of lots of ‘proper’ literature, written by famous authors, that I couldn’t bring myself to finish for one reason or another. But looking across the responses to our survey, it seems that people are much less likely to worry about the quality of writing when it’s been published in a book. And maybe that’s related to the more abstract and emotional responses to print too.

If people appreciate print because it’s slower and more limited than digital, then it follows that books will always be considered a purer form of that than magazines. Because whereas books generally rely on the words on the page to conjure a story in the reader’s mind, magazines try to help out and do some of the work for you. As we’ve seen, people say they like the design and imagery in magazines, but maybe that strength can also become a weakness, making them seem less substantial or serious than books.

And I think that can also point towards another reason for falling rates of reading. Because while some of our respondents told us the different reasons why they don’t like reading magazines, virtually none of them said they don’t like reading books. That might be because people just love books, or it might be because people think they have to say they love books. The book as a cultural object seems to enjoy a special, protected status; we’ve all been told, since we were children, that we should read books, so it’s almost taboo to say otherwise. That’s why the moral panic about not reading carries such force – we’re not worrying about people not reading graphic novels or celebrity interviews; we’re worrying about people not reading the great works of literature that connect us to some timeless, ineffable sense of our humanity.

But the thing is that, sometimes, reading is hard. Describing the differences between magazines and books, our respondents told us that: “Mentally, I feel like I need to set more time aside to read a book to allow time to get into the story. Magazines are easy to flick through, pick and choose, and dip in and out of.” Or similarly, “Magazines are for a curious moment or a lazy moment. Books are more demanding.” Or, “A magazine feels like something I can flip through or dip in and out of, a book feels like more of a commitment.”

This need for deep concentration is part of the pleasure of reading a book, but I suspect that it’s also the main thing that stops lots of people from reading at all. According to our survey, books tend to be seen as improving and serious, which is great if you like that sort of thing, but disastrous if you think it sounds boring, or difficult, or if you’ve just worked a long shift, or you’re a single parent trying to squeeze a bit of light relief in at the end of the day. And that’s why the moral panic that’s coming is so unhelpful, because a deluge of concerned critics tutting their tongues and telling readers to knuckle down to some proper reading isn’t going to persuade anyone at all.

Reading the future

In his Substack post, James Marriott laments “An intellectual tragedy”, as English literature students today find themselves unable to understand writers like William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Jane Austen. It’s more than two decades now since I was a student, studying English at Cambridge University, but I clearly remember struggling to figure out what on earth was supposed to be happening in Paradise Lost. It’s hard! That’s part of the reason why most people don’t encounter it until they’re on a university course. And there’s a massive difference between reading a text like that, along with related criticism, and just picking up a book or a magazine and reading for pleasure.

Responding to the story in The Atlantic, Ryan Broderick used his Garbage Day newsletter to declare, “Reading Is The New Sex, In The Sense That We’re All Probably Worrying Too Much About Both”. After all, he says, both depend on your individual perspective:

“All these pieces – from The Atlantic and elsewhere – about ‘the end’ make this seem like a problem because of how they’re framing it, and who they’re framing it for. Maybe kids aren’t reading the classics, but look at the romantasy moral panic stewing in the background of social media. It’s a whole bunch of mostly men – who, demographically, do not read or buy books at all – declaring it the death of literature even though women and queer people are reading a ton of it. Again, like sex, it seems as though Americans have decided that the amount and kind of reading they personally do is normal and someone else doing it any more or less or differently than them is a social emergency.”

Again, I’m aware that the people who responded to our survey are probably not representative of the ‘average’ reader, whoever that is. But they are readers, and they took the opportunity to emphatically tell us that they love reading. Some things make it harder for them, and some things make it easier, and those are the bits that I think we need to pay attention to.

First of all, we need to recognise the thing we all inherently know, which is that reading in print and reading on screen are different. One is not better than the other, because that depends on the context in which you’re reading, but our research shows that print makes it easier for readers to form a deep, emotional connection with a piece of writing.

You know the feeling: You’re in the middle of a great novel and you’re desperate to finish whatever you’re doing so you can get back into its world. Or the new issue of your favourite magazine arrives and you shove it in your bag so it’s ready for whenever you have a spare moment. That’s the kind of connection that ensures people will read, and that’s the kind of connection that’s more likely to form in print.

And secondly, we need to get over the hollow virtue signalling that comes from reading the ‘right’ thing. Yes, War and Peace is a masterpiece of epic historical storytelling and an intimate exploration of the human condition. But maybe you think it sounds a bit boring, and that’s okay! (Can you tell I’ve never read it? I’ll get there one day.) Our respondents told us that reading a book can sometimes feel demanding, and if you’re not in the mood for that, it has to be okay to pick up something else instead.

In the UK we’re over halfway through the National Year of Reading 2026, an initiative led by the National Literacy Trust, with the aim of creating a once in a generation opportunity to address falling levels of reading. The message from them is clear – all reading is reading, and even audiobooks and podcasts have the potential, “to support learning, wellbeing and reading engagement in many children and young people”. I think that’s the right approach, helping people to discover the many different forms of reading that are available to them, and which could be relevant to their lives. And with a bit of luck, some of those readers might occasionally choose to join an independent magazine club, so they can receive a surprise magazine every month.