Welcome to the first episode of our new podcast season about Liberalism and the Arts.
This episode features our guest Sunil Iyengar who directs the Office of Research & Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. Sunil sits down with Henry Oliver to discuss the state of reading in America, including the long-term decline in book and literature reading, the growth of audiobooks and digital formats, what these shifts mean for children and literacy, how reading relates to civic and social life, the importance of schools, libraries, and access to books, and much more.
New episodes of this podcast season will come out every two weeks.
TRANSCRIPT
HENRY OLIVER: I am here with Sunil Iyengar, who directs the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. This means that he can tell us all about how many people are really reading books. Sunil, hello.
SUNIL IYENGAR: Great to meet you again.
OLIVER: You’re a poet, you’ve published an anthology of narrative verse, and you direct the Office of Research and Analysis. You’re familiar with the literary and literacy scene in a number of different ways. Give us your overall impression of reading in America.
IYENGAR: Thanks. Just to be clear, I’ll speak here on behalf of my role from the NEA’s perspective, from the National Endowment for the Arts, because in that capacity, I get to direct the Office of Research and Analysis. What we do there is we try to mine data and understand what statistics, among other sources, can tell us about arts and culture and society.
Of course, reading is a huge part of what we do, understanding reading. When you ask that question, I might answer it differently from my pastime perspective. In terms of the arts and my role at the NEA, I will say through surveys we’ve done—even before I came to the NEA, 1982, in fact—the first survey, major national representative survey of reading occurred and was directed by the US Census Bureau with the NEA.
We’ve been doing that survey periodically for many, many years, really trying to understand how Americans participate in the arts so we can serve them better through our programs. In fact, reading, I will say the reading numbers have really commanded a lot of public attention, as you suggest. Right now, I will just share—you want me to share?
OLIVER: Of course.
IYENGAR: Right back then when we did the 1982 numbers, it was about 60 percent of all adults who read a book of any type, not required for work or school. You could call it leisure reading. In 2022, in our most recent survey, we’ve actually found that that number’s now at about 49 percent, so just under half. When you look into people reading imaginative literature—so, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, a lot of the stuff you like, of course—we find that those numbers are even lower. In fact, the drop has been steeper. There’s been basically a 30 percent decline in the rate of adults reading those works.
OLIVER: 30 percentage point or 30 percent?
IYENGAR: 30 percent decline. In fact, now it’s about 40 percent of adults who read any form of literature. That’s poetry, plays, short stories, or novels. That’s, again, a 30 percent decline from back in 1982.
OLIVER: Is this the same as some of the other arts, or is reading seeing a bigger decrease?
IYENGAR: Actually, I would say over time there’s a couple of things. One is just by sheer percentages, the sheer percentage of people who read anything in the US is much higher than some of the different art forms we ask about. In other words, you could say that as a way of participating in the arts, reading still commands a very high percentage of adults relative to other art forms.
That said, in terms of the declines, yes, I think not only have they been sharper, but they’ve actually occurred more persistently, in both the share of adults who read literature and the share of adults who read books of any type. I wanted to focus on the literature part because that’s where we see this decline being the steepest right now.
I just said in terms of literature specifically, but if you look at novels and short stories, that’s particularly what’s, I think, driven down those numbers. It’s 40 percent, I think, of adults who are reading any form of literature right now—sorry, I mean books.
OLIVER: I shared a survey number online the other day saying that—I don’t remember the exact number—but quite a lot of Gen Z young women are reading. I just shared the stat, no commentary. I was flooded with people saying, “Yes, but they’re reading pornographic trash. It’s all romantasy. It’s not real books.” Now, I don’t really have a problem with that. Reading is good. Reading is reading. Whatever. Is that true? You’re saying there’s some big shift that the readers who are left tend to be reading that kind of thing and it’s less—
IYENGAR: We don’t know the details of the type of literature they’re reading within, say, fiction or within poetry or these other genres. What we also have seen through other data is that it seems like the people who are reading are maybe even reading a little more, which is interesting. People who are dropping out and not reading, there’s a larger share of those people, the general public.
OLIVER: The ones who are left, it’s more hours of book time?
IYENGAR: That’s coming from another data source. There’s another federal data source that we’ve supported in a study which looked into how much time people spent reading. On average, I think over, again, a very long period, like 20 years or something, it was something like 3 percent drop per year in the share of people who reported, on a given day, reading for fun. That could have been anything. Doesn’t have to be high literature or whatever you want.
OLIVER: Magazine, newspaper?
IYENGAR: Yes. In fact, they found that the people who were reading, they were reading for a longer period than for their counterparts 20 years ago. The few who are reading, or the relatively few who are reading, were reading more intensively, it seems to be, at least in terms of time. That’s a somewhat interesting finding because we don’t monitor sales of books or book buying, but from what you can see from industry reports, it does seem that there may be a difference, for example, between unit sales and total revenue.
A lot of publishing industry may be doing really well, but the number of units, we don’t know exactly whether that’s actually keeping up with the revenue growth and whether that’s actually contributing to more people reading or, in fact, the same people reading maybe more books.
OLIVER: Are people reading on paper, digitally? What’s the breakdown?
IYENGAR: We don’t have a great handle on the differences right now, but I can share that when we ask these questions, we’re neutral to the platform, just to be very clear about that. This is reading of any type, including electronic reading. One good question, it’s related to that, is audiobooks. In fact, when we asked whether people were reading audiobooks as well or doing audiobooks and included that in the number, it grows to 53 percent, but that’s still lower than, say, 55 percent that it was a few years ago, like five years ago.
OLIVER: You’re saying if you factor in audiobooks, the decline is smaller.
IYENGAR: It’s smaller, exactly.
OLIVER: Quite a lot smaller?
IYENGAR: At this stage, we don’t know because we’ve only been doing it for two survey periods. For that one differential, it was just a relatively small decline. It’s possible that if you add audiobooks, if it continues to grow, and if we count that as a percentage of all readers, then, in fact, the decline is mitigated quite a bit.
OLIVER: Actually, it could be that reading has declined, or it could be that a certain percentage of readers have just switched to audio, and the change is not that big overall?
IYENGAR: Right. In fact, we did a report a few years ago which was precisely about that, called How Do We Read? It was all about audiobooks versus print books. From the limited data we have so far, it does seem that adding audiobooks to reading, if you include that in your definition of reading as a whole, then, in fact, it’s still a decline from the share who did that five years ago, but it’s a much smaller share. It does suggest, in the out years, it may very well be that audiobooks mitigates the decline much more, and maybe it even puts us on par with the trend line for the past or traditional reading.
OLIVER: Now, there’s obviously a huge online debate about, do audiobooks count as real reading? Do you have or have you seen any good data, or analysis, about retention rates, comprehension rates? Do they change across print and audio?
IYENGAR: That’s a great question. I haven’t seen anything about print versus audio in terms of how it improves comprehension or learning. I do know though, that—and I think you’d agree—there are almost different complementary skills that are fostered through those different ways of engaging with literature. On the one hand, it’s listening, it’s attentiveness with audiobooks, it’s imagination to a large degree.
With reading, you’re dealing with lexical patterns of recognition and different cognitive processes, so I would be surprised if it was equivalent, but clearly, I don’t know enough to say whether one is superior to the other in terms of overall comprehension.
Digital reading is a little different, though. With digital reading, we do have some data, particularly from other studies that have been done internationally, suggesting that digital reading, especially for early readers, it may have a negative effect on overall comprehension. That is to say, if you come in reading through digital reading only, it’s not clear that that’s really improving your overall comprehension, whereas it is clear with print reading in early stages, especially of learning how to read, childhood development, that it does benefit total reading comprehension.
OLIVER: Is that because of some weird magical factor of looking at a screen is bad, or is it because you’re possibly just likely to be reading less challenging material?
IYENGAR: It’s a little of both, actually. The studies I’ve seen talk about perhaps less challenging words and vocabulary that’s maybe accessed through purely digital means, but that doesn’t seem to be the primary factor. It also seems to be that through digital reading, there’s a lot of skipping around. Maybe there’s hyperlinks, or you’re led to another place, the jumping around.
There’s a whole theory about shallow processing, the idea that perhaps people cognitively are not imbibing as much when they’re reading that way, especially in early stages when their domain knowledge might not be as big as it is later in life. There’s a tendency, at least in some studies, to show that early reading, especially through digital formats where you’re jumping around a little more, you’re being invited maybe to go to another webpage and come back to where you were, that might be great in some settings, maybe for some kinds of informational processing, but not necessarily for reading long text.
OLIVER: It’s a question of developing a different sort of skill, a different type of reading skill.
IYENGAR: Yes. I think this is truthfully something that needs further research. The verdict is not all in for purely print all the time. One thing, again, I think it’s like what we were talking about with those people who are still reading today—and there are a lot of them, of course—who are reading print and digital. I think that’s what you’re going to see, I think, is much more of this complementary function.
Some of the studies I’ve seen show that if people already have a good grasp of reading and print, then they’re much more likely to gravitate to digital and maybe even choose that as their primary reading method. Nothing seems to hold up their comprehension in that regard. It’s more people who go straight to digital without having had that print experience.
OLIVER: If you start with digital aged five to 10, you end up as a very different sort of reader than if you are a print-based reading learner, and switch in your teens or 20s.
IYENGAR: Even the way we assess comprehension, maybe that’s going to change in the future because the very things that we think valuable retaining may change depending on what the formats are and what the types of texts are. Right now, it does seem, at least from the studies I was looking at—and they’re largely international studies, like meta-analyses of hundreds of thousands of people included in these studies—where they seem to be consistent on digital reading is at best modest benefits for people’s comprehension, but at worst, a full-on negative effect on particularly an early-stage reader.
OLIVER: For the young children?
IYENGAR: Yes.
OLIVER: There’s this constant thing in these debates where people are interested in two different things, I think. The first thing is, are people reading novels? What’s the state of literature? How are the arts doing? The second thing is more just to do with literacy, the level of reading skill, comprehension, and the downstream effects of that socially, politically, in the workforce, whatever. It’s very hard to keep those two things separate, isn’t it?
Can you give us some sense, from all the data you have commissioned and looked at and worked on, are these two things going in a trend together, or is it that a lot of people like us, who like literature, are getting very scared about the decline of reading, but in real money, it’s not making that much difference in day-to-day society? What’s the balance here?
IYENGAR: I think it’s very important to keep that in mind because people who read anyway, and agencies that promote reading, are doing it because they know it’s intrinsically valuable, when you do talk about the why, for people who have no interest or idea of why this is something important, you do have to tie it to measurable outcomes.
There are data, and we’ve produced some of it, showing that, in fact, readers tend to be more civically engaged, more socially engaged, and they tend to read better too. There’s a bidirectionality here, of course, because people who read well to begin with are going to gravitate, a lot of times, to reading and reading more. It also works the other way, that people who go to reading and want to read, get better as readers. It is reciprocal.
In terms of other instrumental kinds of outcomes, we know that readers are, like they said, more likely to be engaged in their communities than people who don’t read. A lot of this is also overlapped with the variable of education, though. What kind of education they have, there’s all kinds of socioeconomic graphic variables in this. When we’ve controlled for some of that, it still seems that reading is very positively associated with some of those kinds of civic benefits of volunteering, taking part in school, community events.
In school settings, we’ve seen that with out-of-school activities correlated with things like that. I do think, though, that just knowing how to read and the literacy component is obviously etched into the way we’re supposed to conduct a democracy and civic life and being a member of the democracy and contributing in all other ways. I think it’s very much tied with the health of the nation in a lot of ways that are writ large, even if sometimes we have to keep pointing to those connections through research.
OLIVER: There is one thesis that goes around is that as people read less or as fewer people read, people generally get worse at media literacy, at being able to evaluate the truth of claims. This leads to the general instability and craziness of the world that is being experienced in multiple ways. There doesn’t, to me, seem to be much positive evidence to link these two things. It seems to be a sort of these two things are happening, therefore. Do you know of any such evidence?
IYENGAR: Linking the people’s failure to read with?
OLIVER: It could just be that smart, conscientious people will always be more civically engaged, better at evaluating the things that politicians say, better at knowing that this news channel is biased in this way or whatever, and that it’s not because they read. The reading decline is like a graph that gets shared online, but it isn’t necessarily—
IYENGAR: Tied to these things?
OLIVER: Yes. If reading was going up 3 percent a year instead of down 3 percent a year, is it that in five years, do we have research that really suggests that, yes, society would be very different.
IYENGAR: I think you’re right to point out that this is all correlational, there’s no causal effect. We’re not showing that if people do read more, automatically their circumstances are going to improve. It’s just that over time, even when you control for other factors, you often see that people who read more, and read literature even more, tend to be correlated with outcomes that objectively seem better than outcomes for the people who don’t, according to certain outcomes.
We look at economic factors, outcomes, their own earnings and civic contributions, things like that. There’s a lot that we’re not capturing. It would be too much to say that if the chart’s going down, you’re automatically going to see everything go to hell in a hand basket or whatever. That’s not really what we’re trying to articulate either. I think it’s just these are indicators of how engaged people are with the act of imagination.
I think sometimes the word empathy is overused in this context, but it’s the ability to inhabit another perspective or viewpoint, or character when you read. I think those kinds of functions, and even the quietening of the mind to have a space where one is focused and has attention, those are skillsets, if you want to call it that, or attributes that I think can easily get eroded.
The other thing I’ll just share is—you know this—Maryanne Wolf and researchers who are neuroscientists have talked about, reading is not a natural activity. It’s really something that humans do that takes a lot of work, cognitively, neurobiologically, and semantically. It’s something that we can’t take for granted. Sometimes you do need some markers or some trend lines to monitor, to know whether we’re on the right track.
OLIVER: This is that wonderful book, Proust and the Squid.
IYENGAR: Yes.
OLIVER: That’s largely about children. I want to go back to that point about children reading on screens. I looked at some of the studies and the data about this, and it’s not clear to me what’s really going on. If a child is, let’s say they’re eight, they’re using WhatsApp, they’re clicking hyperlinks, they’re doing that kind of digital reading. Obviously that’s probably not sensible after a certain threshold, but if they’re given an iPad and they’re going to read an encyclopedia article on the iPad, is that really any different to if they’re just given—we had a paper encyclopedia.
IYENGAR: See, this is where it gets tricky because when you censure digital reading like that, you’re saying that every single category is just useless.
OLIVER: The research isn’t picking apart—
IYENGAR: No, you’re right. It’s not quite as nuanced as that. A lot of even these great meta-analyses, I think, are categorically talking about digital reading. Some of it is only focused on nonfiction, information-type stuff. I’m sure there’s subtleties like that, but if you want to paint it with a broad brush, I think it’s fair to say that some of the characteristics of digital reading that involve skipping around, there’s been studies of eye-tracking movements and how shallow or the skimming patterns that go on with digital reading versus print reading.
I think the jury’s out on long-term effects on those, but even anecdotally or even just understanding some of the research that we’ve seen, as limited as it is, suggests that people are not engaging as deeply with that particular text. Maybe that’s okay with just an encyclopedia entry or a timetable for a metro train or something, but when you’re getting into something that maybe is more substantive, we think—we, the society thinks—it deserves greater scrutiny or greater attention, like maybe a newspaper article that’s about a candidate; or if you’re talking literature, a work that’s going to move you to a new height of inspiration or understanding.
I think those kinds of works probably deserve much more attention, and it’s not clear yet that some of the digital formats enable that. Now, I do think e-books and digital reading, there’s nothing to suggest that it’s not doing as well as print books in terms of comprehension, but I think when you talk about digital reading as a class versus just print reading, I think it’s easier to point at potential gaps in digital reading.
OLIVER: If we want to take the research we have and make as informed a decision as we can about how children should read—books are good, a Kindle that only has books and doesn’t have any other stuff on it, that’s basically probably as good, an internet connection that they use for encyclopedias and other things is probably a lot better than social media, WhatsApp, whatever.
IYENGAR: I think that’s very well put. I think some of those are really good for things. It’s possible that I would recommend maybe a kid to—I’m not speaking for a policy thing—but I would say it may be that in some cases, the encyclopedia online is going to be way better than going and trying to find the book that bears that particular article in it. It depends on what it’s being used for, what kind of information is being retrieved. I think information retrieval is, obviously, in a different category in a way than reading, not just for information.
Again, the surveys we do are about books and also what I’m calling imaginative literature. Literature that’s novel, short stories, poems, and plays where, yes, there’s a different kind of information in it. Like William Carlos Williams said, “You can get the news out of poems.” There is news there, but it’s not really information retrieval as we’re talking about it.
OLIVER: Do we know what predicts whether someone will become a reader?
IYENGAR: Shortly, I don’t know exactly what the answer is to that, but I know studies have shown that clearly high levels of parental education, socioeconomic affluence doesn’t hurt, but I would say, clearly access to raw materials. In fact, even things like the numbers of books in a home, I don’t know if they’re dwindling now as a society, but that has been highly correlated with, in fact, reading ability and propensity to read as well.
OLIVER: Does it matter if there are books in the home versus the child is regularly taken to a library, has a library at school?
IYENGAR: I don’t know enough to know those differences. I don’t know if there’s a big difference there.
OLIVER: Access to books?
IYENGAR: Having them around or even having the ability to access them, I think, is a big piece of all this. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to trick a young child into reading. Part of it is just having a book around maybe in a place where they wouldn’t expect it.
OLIVER: I have lots of tricks, yes.
IYENGAR: There are many like that, I’m sure. I think that’s another thing, is having the proximity to these points of engagement.
OLIVER: Are libraries more or less important than they used to be?
IYENGAR: We actually don’t conduct surveys directly with libraries, but we do look at some of the library data, there’s a public library survey. Yes, they seem to still be doing really well. It’s possible that maybe a lot of what’s attracting people to libraries for a long time was internet access. I don’t know if that’s the case anymore, but a lot of that is also in the mix like engaging with technology in these libraries.
I know that, of course, as we were just talking about, going there and engaging with books and checking out books, it remains, I hope, a major part of what they do. I think a lot of libraries are also changing a lot of what their functions are in their communities. They’re no longer just repositories of books. They’re definitely engaging through community activities, education. They’ve become artistic venues as well. I think they’re definitely very dynamic. I don’t know enough about the finances or where they’re headed right now, but I will say that from all the signs I’ve seen, they’re still going strong.
OLIVER: One of the things in some of the historical data I found is that there was an increase in reading literature between 2002 and 2008. It was this funny bump in the graph. A lot of that was brought about by young people reading more literature. Do we know why that bump happened?
IYENGAR: That’s a great question. The questions I would get when that came out is, “Was it the Harry Potter effect and all that stuff?” I really don’t know. It was a really interesting bump. I will share that, soon before I came into the NEA, the chair there, Dana Gioia at the time, had commissioned a report called Reading at Risk, because he basically found that the survey data that I was just describing, in 1982, that number I gave—
OLIVER: 60 percent.
IYENGAR: —it slipped to 57 percent.
OLIVER: Yes, the graph is quite steep.
IYENGAR: Yes. That was a pretty sharp decline from ’82 for reading literature; it was 57 percent to 47 percent of adults. That was between 1982 and 2002. He said, “Let’s just do this report. Let’s get people to understand this problem,” which he saw as a national crisis. The NEA teamed up with publishers, bookstores, libraries, and really tried to get ahead of this, and did things like national book reading campaigns. The NEA founded something called The Big Read, which still goes on. It’s very successful. I think it’s engaged 6 million people through its programs, 2,000 or so programs all around the country.
That was something that started, and there were a lot of such programs around that time, between 2002 and 2008, when that study came out. I’m not saying it all can be laid at the door of NEA’s programs, but I know there was a wholehearted attempt by a lot of people in the literacy community and in the literature community to try to get more people to read. I don’t say it’s attributable to that one thing, but I think it was part of a movement that happened over that brief period.
OLIVER: Now, the other thing that surprised me is that the adult audience for poetry seems to have grown in recent years, or at least remained pretty steady. It’s gone up a bit more for young people than for adults. That’s quite shocking.
IYENGAR: It’s interesting. I think it was 12 percent 20 years ago or so, and then it dipped, and then it came back up. Not quite to the original level of 12 percent of adults who read poetry, but it’s still 9 percent.
OLIVER: We’re between 9 percent and 12 percent.
IYENGAR: Yes. It’s about 9 percent or so who, in the last survey, read any poem in their last year. Something I should tell people is when we ask these questions, we’re asking them to think back to the last year, 12 months, and did they do that activity? Did they read a book? We don’t say they have to have finished it. Did they read a book at all? Did they read a novel, short story, play, whatever?
OLIVER: You know my favorite Samuel Johnson quote, it’s in Life of Boswell, and he’s talking to someone about how he read this book, and he didn’t think it was very good, and he didn’t finish it. His companion says, “What do you mean you didn’t finish it?” Johnson goes, “Sir, do you read books through?” Appalled that anyone would finish a book.
IYENGAR: Exactly. Poetry reading, it’s interesting because at the time—and there were a wave of these news articles that came out when we came out with these findings suggesting it was the—I don’t know if they’re still around, the Instapoets or the Instapoetry.
OLIVER: My follow-up question is, was it Instagram?
IYENGAR: Yes. That was a big theory that that may have been some of it. Again, I don’t know, but I think there were a lot of people at that time who were very happy to see that up. Again, it tells us these aren’t irreversible declines. That gives some hope. I think again, just to say novels of short stories right now, it’s, I think I said 38 percent of adults who read one of those, and that’s pretty low. The thing is, I didn’t share this, but when you look at men versus women, it’s just a starker decline. It’s like 20 percent.
OLIVER: I really want to ask you about that because the 20 percent gap, the gap has remained the same while the other numbers have gone down. What is that?
IYENGAR: The percentage of men and women reading are reading much less than they did before in all these forms. However, women are still reading more than men at a higher rate, and at 20 percent point split. That’s persisted. I guess we should be worried, especially about the men here, because I said it was 38 percent of adults who read a novel, short story. It’s more like 28 percent for men. It’s going lower and lower.
One thing I will share with a lot of our arts attendance questions, even for arts participation, you often see women doing a lot more of these activities than men.
OLIVER: By participation, you mean going to a concert?
IYENGAR: Largely, attendance. Some forms of art creating, we see men actually having a higher rate, but a lot of times the women are leading in terms of the sheer number of people.
OLIVER: Where do men lead in art creation?
IYENGAR: That’s for certain things. I know that occurred when I was looking at something like music or jazz, particularly. You can see some specific forms where you see that happening.
OLIVER: Dad’s in a band.
IYENGAR: Maybe, yes.
OLIVER: Interesting. Then you mentioned The Big Read. You also have the Poetry Out Loud scheme. Both of these schemes seem to have done a lot. What is the success? What’s the factor?
IYENGAR: I think there’s a real rich community element in all this. The NEA gives grants, and through its partners, supports these events, where it’s not just one lone nonprofit organization who’s trying to make a difference. They’re partnering with others to make something happen. For Poetry Out Loud, for example, it’s schools and the state arts agencies.
Every state has a state arts agency. They are, in turn, our partners with this. It’s like a pyramid structure of a competition, like the Spelling Bee or something, for the Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. There’s a whole infrastructure there that’s mobilized with our funding and with our partners. Therefore, it becomes almost like a competitive event.
If you’ve ever been to a Poetry Out Loud event, I’d highly recommend it if you’re in any state in the country, and then the national ones here in DC. There’s a cheering section. People are really excited about hearing a poem being recited. It’s done with such flourish. There’s poise, there’s things you look for in an arts performance.
There’s some great outcomes for the students. They often will report afterward how much it made them love reading and love literature, but also feel engaged in their communities and in life. There’s a lot of that. I think there’s a spillover benefit of bringing the literature out into the communities and not so much assuming that it’s happening all in solitude, although, of course, a lot of reading is happening in solitude. There’s ways to bring that social element to literature that I think we can uniquely do through arts programming.
OLIVER: For these two programs, how well do we understand whether the young people involved were already readers, or are being brought to become readers, or are becoming more serious readers? Do we have a good grip on that?
IYENGAR: With The Big Read particularly, we know that all kinds of people get engaged in these programs from nonreaders to readers who don’t read that much, to people who are really passionate about books. It’s usually like they’ll choose a book as a community to celebrate and to do arts programming around. I think with America 250 this year, there’s a lot of American literature that’s really in the forefront.
I think that that is very variable. There’s talking about books. There’s maybe book clubs around it. There’s social events. There are people who aren’t necessarily in it for the literature, frankly, but are just there to have a good time. In the process, they rub shoulders with the work because it’s a theme of an event, or maybe there’s a speaker who comes to give a little lecture on that book.
They participate in a way that’s not quite directly reading the literature. I think these are other ways that people can get at reading. Then hopefully down the road, and we don’t know yet, the follow-up is, are they likely now to read if they didn’t read before?
OLIVER: I think you said 6 million children have done The Big Read?
IYENGAR: Not children, people.
OLIVER: Do we know how many of them were low-volume readers of any sort before they joined the program?
IYENGAR: We don’t know that from that data. That’s a great question. In fact, that’s something I know that, when he established this program years ago, Dana Gioia, was really big on understanding. We did some surveys at the time to understand the initial years of The Big Read, whether people were actually changing their reading practices.
What we learned is a lot of people were changing their attitudes toward reading. We don’t know if they continued reading because we didn’t continue the study. What we saw was they were much more likely to say they were going to go to a book club, or they were going to, next time go to the library even more often, and things like that.
OLIVER: How much do we know about reading habits among people for whom English is a second language?
IYENGAR: Oh, great question. Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot at the national level. As I said, with our survey data, when we break it out, for example, by race and ethnicity, we can see that certain demographic subgroups have much lower rates than the national level rate that I gave. Some of those may, in fact, be people whose first language was not English.
OLIVER: We don’t know if they are reading in their first language?
IYENGAR: We don’t know that. The survey does not specify a language. The Census Bureau has ways of getting at households where the first language isn’t English. I don’t think we have enough of a sample to know what, in general—that’s a great question—people whose first language isn’t English, how they’re doing, whether they’re reading their own literature, whether they’re reading English literature. We don’t know.
OLIVER: We don’t know if among people for whom Spanish is a first language or a co-language, we don’t know if they’re doing a lot of Spanish reading?
IYENGAR: It’s an analysis we could do with these data. It’s very interesting that you asked that. I think it’s worth pursuing.
OLIVER: One thing that really stayed with me was when I learned that sales of poetry written in Irish are actually quite a lot more robust. There’s a strong community of people who still read that, which, I don’t know, it felt unexpected to me.
IYENGAR: Was that in the UK?
OLIVER: I think it’s in Ireland itself.
IYENGAR: Oh, in Ireland. That’s great.
OLIVER: It’s very interesting.
IYENGAR: That is very interesting. I’d be very interested, as a reader, to know a lot more about the sub-genres and what kinds of groups are gravitating to what kinds of reading. With these surveys, as you can appreciate, they’re an instrument that can sometimes be a blunt instrument because it’s a quick survey, and you have to ask it of thousands and thousands of people.
Tens of thousands of people are getting these questions. You only have limited time with them to ask these questions, especially since we work with the Census Bureau, which has its own survey, so we tack onto their survey. Not to bore you, but I’m just saying that there’s a lot more questions if we had the real estate we would love to ask on the survey.
OLIVER: I wanted to get to this because there are a lot of surveys being pushed in the media about the decline of reading, whether they’re your data, other people are doing surveys. There’s so much of this. There are so many graphs showing, “Oh my goodness, it’s going down.” One thing I’m getting from you in this conversation is that we don’t know everything we would need to know, and that we can make some tentative conclusions, but we should be open to the idea that the real picture might not be quite what it looks like.
IYENGAR: I think you’re right. The only thing I would caution about is we’ve been asking the question, in some ways, the same way for years and years and years.
OLIVER: That, do you read a book?
IYENGAR: Yes. Do you read a book of any type? It could have been any kind, et cetera. Now, of course, the ways people read have expanded enormously since 40 years ago or 30 years ago or 20 years ago. I think there is something to the trend line. There is a marked decline in the general population. Again, the thing to remind people is, it’s the general population.
People often say, “People are still reading. I’m seeing people on the metro reading Middlemarch.” I’m like, “That’s great. Where do you live. What’s your zip code?” I think you have to talk about the entire country, and it’s a pretty large country. If you see the rates eroding over a period of many years and somewhat—there was a blip here and there, but it’s pretty much a particular direction—I think it’s worth maybe sitting up a little more, then say, a poll, which is a snapshot survey, and it says that things seem to be fine because 80 percent of people are reading. I do think there’s a lot of nuance, though, that we have to unpack. There’s a lot more we’d like to know as researchers, and I think there’s a lot the policymakers could know. I would say there’s a preponderant amount of these data showing that fewer and fewer people are reading works of literature, as we broadly define it, and also books in general.
OLIVER: Do we know from time use surveys what they’re doing instead?
IYENGAR: We know some of the things you would imagine, TV, going online, all those things take up much more time in an average given day.
OLIVER: What’s the biggest? To me, it always seems that TV is the enemy of reading, not really the internet.
IYENGAR: It was TV. I think the last I looked, it was like close to two hours.
OLIVER: It’s more like three hours, I think.
IYENGAR: I think it’s like that. I don’t know what the latest was. For reading, it’s something like 16 minutes on average. This is not that everybody’s spending 16 minutes. They’re taking average numbers. Sixteen minutes a day out of a day, leisure time, I have to stress that, so they could have been reading for work. Sixteen minutes versus two or three hours for TV.
That’s staring you in the face right there. Part of the reason we do these surveys is because we want the public to be aware of how the country is doing on certain indicators because it’s discretionary time. People have limited leisure time and different people from different backgrounds have even less leisure time than other people. It’s not an equal attribute. It’s scarce.
We want people to know that there are things you could be doing with your leisure time and there’s opportunity costs to that. Reading is probably one of those things that’s high on the list of something people could spend more of their time budget doing and maybe reap some rewards.
OLIVER: This general idea that it’s social media and phones that have taken away time from reading, that’s not necessarily reflected in the time use surveys? It’s more likely to be TV or it’s a bit of both?
IYENGAR: I think it’s a bit of both. I don’t know that the time use survey actually has a clear read on that social media stuff. I’ll have to go back and look. That’s not our survey. It’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that has that. I wouldn’t be surprised if social media is now a bigger share of what they do.
OLIVER: We don’t know if social media is taking away from time that would have been TV, right?
IYENGAR: That I don’t know right now.
OLIVER: It always seems to me that if you’re watching short-form videos on Instagram, you would otherwise have been watching Netflix or watching HBO.
IYENGAR: That’s what I want to go back and look at, is when they ask about TV, I can’t imagine it’s sitting in front of a TV set.
OLIVER: I think a lot of is streaming.
IYENGAR: Streaming or it could be in the middle of a social media post. It could be very much intermingled with social media activity. I don’t know how they ask that question. It’s easily discoverable though because it’s on their website and everything.
OLIVER: The basic takeaway from the research you’ve done and that you’ve read is that it’s not so much the internet that killed reading as television and radio?
IYENGAR: I don’t know. You look at the time use survey and you keep seeing this discrepancy of, on the one hand, TV and reading, maybe social media in there. You might conclude that that’s the big bear, TV. I think the reason I’m hesitating a little is because, again, this is all correlational, but when you look at the co-occurrence of this with the rise of social media, and particularly some of these declines happening and being accelerated during a period when social media is even more prolific, I guess we just question whether there’s any kind of relationship there because so many educators and others have attended to perhaps excessive social media usage, especially among the young, eroding certain patterns of cognition. If that’s the case, then we would assume that some of that is bearing out in these reading numbers as well. I don’t have a hard answer for that.
OLIVER: On this point about patterns of cognition, there was an email posted on Marginal Revolution last year from a teacher. He said his students are not good at linear reading anymore, which is, he gives them Aristotle and they can’t just read the book and understand it. They’re much better at finding connections between texts and spotting these patterns across, which he said is maybe because that’s what they do online. They constantly move between things. To what extent do you think we’re seeing reading is changing? It’s not dying; it’s becoming something different?
IYENGAR: Maybe we’re underselling some of the benefits of digital reading. It’s just that I think it’s important really to have both. I guess I don’t know the context, like if the person—assuming this is higher education, these are probably people—
OLIVER: I think he’s a high school [teacher].
IYENGAR: Good. I think that there’s clearly benefits to that kind of reading in knowledge retrieval, again, as we were saying, but also to make new discoveries en route to reading a text. I guess the question remains if that substitutes for what he’s calling linear reading, if the benefits are going to be less weakened. And what are the benefits we’re talking about? Retention, attention, the ability to form one’s own idea or relationship to the material, and true engagement with the text.
I don’t know if it’s being compromised or it’s being expanded. I suspect that if people already enjoy reading, as you said or suggested, that it is circular, people enjoy reading and they go to reading anyway, then they’re probably getting some benefits out of that type of reading. It’s just that if that supplants what that person called linear reading, I guess I would be a little concerned.
OLIVER: Do you think there’s a problem that children are made to read books in school that they hate, and that that kills the love of reading?
IYENGAR: That could be it. I don’t know. I think everything has to be questioned. I don’t know that it’s texts are not the ones they like or whatever. When I was looking at the men and women split, part of that, I was wondering, is it that they’re not directed to the right things they may like.
OLIVER: Does that split start in childhood?
IYENGAR: Yes, it does start in childhood. Actually, what I was thinking of just now is just getting back to kids, and this isn’t about gender, but I’m just saying that among nine-year-olds, it turns out like 40 percent of them now say they’ll read for fun almost every day. That’s pretty good. That used to be 53 percent 10 years ago. Similarly, for 13-year-olds, I think it’s half of the share of people who said they would read for fun every day has gone away. It used to be 27 percent, now it’s 14 percent.
I think there’s definitely this decline that I’ve been talking about in adults, the survey we’re doing is an adult survey. You can look at other surveys that have been done, again, by the government through the Department of Education, and you see a similar pattern. Getting back to this issue of, is it just a blip and is it irrelevant? I don’t know if you can say that, like what if society’s great and everything’s all right?
You see so many of these things through pretty legitimate federally—not everything in federal is necessarily legitimate—but I’m saying these nationally representative surveys. The time use survey, and the Department of Education surveys—
OLIVER: —they’re all pointing in the same direction.
IYENGAR: They’re all pointing in the same direction, and they’re tending to show that split between men and women, boys and girls. Again, both of them declining, but with that split in terms of girls reading more than boys.
OLIVER: How important is it for parents to read to their children?
IYENGAR: Oh, it’s extremely important, we know. When you said predictor, I think that’s another one.
OLIVER: That’s a big one?
IYENGAR: That’s a big one. I think the reading to children piece, if you look at that time use study, it was a very small percentage of parents who did that. That was, I think, one of the things the authors of the study noted, is they were concerned about the fact that so few adults—I don’t have the percentage, but it was in the single digits, very low—who said they read to their children.
OLIVER: Do we know that it’s gone down? Because I know that anecdotally it feels like it’s gone down, but I say this to a lot of parents and they say, “Who are these parents who’ve got time to read to their kids? No one ever read to me when I was a child.”
IYENGAR: That’s true. Actually, this time use study, didn’t find a change in the share of people reading to their kids, but it was a low share to begin with. That’s what their point is.
OLIVER: It might be that it’s always been low and we overrate it because we love reading to our kids, but actually it’s having the books around and they do it at school, they’ll find a way?
IYENGAR: Right. I think we can overplay the social benefit or the instrumental benefit of doing this stuff. Another angle or piece to think about is our artistic heritage, if you will. Like just having access to the great things that have been done in the past. You could probably quote some really good philosophers on this. I guess what I’m saying is, are we forfeiting access or precluding access to great ways of participating in the arts? That’s what we’re trying to do is bolster and give people more direct engagement with arts product, if you will.
OLIVER: That was Adam Smith’s justification for—he didn’t call it the NEA—but when he said the government should fund something like the NEA, he didn’t think it would improve society or be wonderful. He thought education was instrumentally useful, but he basically said it was for the benefit of the citizens and it would be good for them individually.
IYENGAR: I think it’s a very humane way to think about it.
OLIVER: What about the international comparison? Everything we’ve said has been about America. Are we an outlier in this country? Is it the same in Europe? What’s the play?
IYENGAR: I do remember years ago—and again, I’m sorry I don’t have this in the top of my head—but there’s something called the PISA, which is an acronym for an international assessment of students across the country. I don’t believe they look at propensity to read or whether people read for fun, but they do look at reading scores. If I remember, we were in the middle of the pack, the US was. I’ll have to go back and look, but Department of Education, I think, used to be involved in that. I do know that internationally, I know in the UK, they’ve been having similar issues with reading rates. It’s been widely publicized. I haven’t looked at too many other countries at this point.
OLIVER: If you could implement one new policy to get the number to go up, what would it be?
IYENGAR: I can’t, as a mere government official right now, say what policy I would implement. That wouldn’t be my place.
OLIVER: Does the research suggest what such a policy might beneficially—
IYENGAR: It takes an infrastructure of support, so you need to have—
OLIVER: There’s no magic wand.
IYENGAR: There’s no magic model, but you do need to have some basic supports. I think you need to have community reading, like libraries, bookstores, book fairs. You need that kind of stuff. You need schools that value literature and ideally rich breadth of literature, reading of all types. You need to have places where kids can sneak away and read the nonofficial books. You need to have all that kind of stuff.
Of course, digitally, you need that access through digital media. It is there. There’s a lot of great places to go. It’s just that, as we all know, you need a guide, you need a Virgil or something to take you through the internet, to show, especially young learners, where to go for this kind of material. Some schools and a lot of educators are really good at directing them, but I’m just suggesting that at this early stage, especially given what we’re seeing with the numbers, it probably behooves us not to close the door on digital reading, but definitely don’t close the door on print reading at that stage, I would say.
OLIVER: If the takeaways are something like, the younger they are, the more print they need—
IYENGAR: According to some studies, yes.
OLIVER: This is all research-based. The younger they are, the more print they need, social infrastructure is very important, institutions are very important, but we should bear in mind that the research is not definitive about digital audiobooks, print, the whole balance, and we need to try and get the best of all of these aspects?
IYENGAR: I think so. I think it’s a more and more kind of thing. Cultural researchers refer to the omnivore theory, the idea that when people get hooked and get into one particular art form, a lot of times they’ll hop around and they get engaged with some other art form because they’ve had the bug.
I think that’s something we want in readers because it’ll expose people to many, many more ideas and portals of imagination than just one route alone. As you said, there are also measurable outcomes that we’ve seen over time. We can’t say it’s causal, but in terms of those people who tend to read more, also seem to have, in aggregate, certain economic outcomes, civic outcomes, and social outcomes that are more favorable than those who don’t.
IYENGAR: There’s a lot that we still don’t know, and I think it’s really important that we don’t be complacent.
OLIVER: Are we going to find it out, or are we just going to have to live with the mystery?
IYENGAR: Surveys are getting better. We’re hoping to redesign the survey, so maybe in the next few years we’ll have something better. The thing is with government surveys, there’s always a bit of a lag because we do the survey, and then the data comes out. We have to process it and do the write-ups. Maybe AI will help. We don’t know.
Then at some point, the report comes out, and it’s maybe a couple of years after the actual survey was conducted. I do think there’s a lot of smart ways now people are getting data in more organic ways, through online transactions, through all kinds of other means that I think would greatly enhance what we know about reading in the future. I’m hopeful that we can tap into some of that stuff in the future.
OLIVER: It’s good to have the lag because everything is so driven by the current scare story, the current thing.
IYENGAR: That’s true. I think what’s great about these surveys, even if I sometimes critique our own work, or I often do, it’s large. These are large shares of the population, and it’s truly nationally representative. They do everything they can to knock on the doors and get the right people into the sample frame. The fact it’s been done periodically or historically, there’s a great trend line there. I think we can never be complacent about it. I think it’s great that you’re asking about these questions because it suggests that maybe there’s more people who care about this than just us lone social science researchers.
OLIVER: I think a lot of people care about the general question of the reading decline, and they want more in-depth numbers.
IYENGAR: More information. Definitely.
OLIVER: It can look like we really know what’s going on, but what I find interesting about this is, well, up to a point.
IYENGAR: One of the things we are trying to get better at with these surveys is, not only the people who read or receive stuff, but put stuff out into the world. A lot of our work on creating art, we’re now getting to things like doing podcasts, what all kinds of formats people engage with. There’s definitely some connection there. We, in fact, ask about writing creatively, and we get those numbers too. That, I think, has declined a little bit, but not so steeply.
OLIVER: You don’t think people are switching from consuming art to creating it?
IYENGAR: That’s what I want to see, actually. I want to see more of that. I think it’s going to take some time as well as the actual changes to the survey.
OLIVER: Now, I can’t let you go without bringing up the fact that, as a child you had a party trick, which was that you could date any book by its smell.
IYENGAR: Apparently, yes. I was living in rural Mississippi at the time. I don’t know why, but we just moved there. I guess maybe I was trying to be popular. I don’t think this is something I’d recommend. We were in the school libraries and stuff. I don’t know how this started, but I’d find these books, and they’re often very old, sitting on the shelves. Who would have read them in a school library? I’d pick them up and I would smell the pages. In doing so, for some reason, I could usually date the book.
OLIVER: Within?
IYENGAR: Within a couple of years, usually. I got pretty good at it. I didn’t do this 24 hours, but it was something I would do as a party trick in the school. I remember once, a teacher getting irritated because I was making people laugh or doing something like that. Then that teacher got interested and was giving me books to look at and read and smell.
OLIVER: The teacher had you sniff the books?
IYENGAR: Yes. I remember this. I would always get it within a year or two, and I think this is something to do with a vintage or a fine wine. You could just tell what year it was brewed or whatever. It was something like that. It’s long lost; I’ve moved to reading them or—
OLIVER: You’ve moved to reading the books.
IYENGAR: —talking about them or doing studies about them rather than actually sniffing book glue.
OLIVER: Very good. Sunil Iyengar, this was excellent. Thank you very much.
IYENGAR: I hope so. Thanks a lot. Great to be here.
