New Pew Research Report on Reading Habits Is Great, Yes, But Don't Sleep On All of Their Reports

The Pew Research Center is a great resource for information about how American interact with their world on a variety of topics, and their reports are always FREE. From their "About" page:

Pew Research Center is made up of intellectually curious people from across many fields, places and backgrounds. For decades, our expertise, best-in-class methods and commitment to high-quality, fact-based research have made us a trusted resource for leaders and everyday people around the world.  

Our mission

We generate a foundation of facts that enriches public dialogue and supports sound decision-making. We are nonprofit, nonpartisan and nonadvocacy. We value independence, objectivity, accuracy, rigor, humility, transparency and innovation. 

What do we mean by nonprofit? We are funded from charitable dollars. All our resources serve our mission. We do not do any work for hire. 

What do we mean by nonpartisan? We maintain strict impartiality and never align with any political group, candidate or ideology.

What do we mean by nonadvocacy? We study people’s views and behaviors without an agenda. We don’t make policy recommendations or offer solutions. We design our work to explain the public, rather than try to persuade.

Read more about our mission.  

Our research

We study a wide range of topics.

We decide what to study based on questions people are asking, changes happening in the world and gaps where clear information is hard to find. We focus on areas where our expertise, resources and intellectual curiosity can help people better understand the world around them.   

We take our responsibility to inform the public seriously. Every step of our work goes through multiple layers of review to ensure it is high quality and fact based. We share our data and survey questions so that all can see the process and how we arrived at our results.   

Our methods

We ask thousands of people of various ages, ethnicities and backgrounds to share what they think in a survey. We listen to what they say about jobs, politics, religion, education, health and more. We bring those voices together and summarize everything we hear. Before we publish anything, our work goes through several rounds of careful review to make sure it upholds our commitment to high-quality, fact-based research.    

Read more about our methods. 

Click through to read the entire page.

They have frequently turned their inquiries to topics surrounding books and reading, and this month they released one of those reports entitled, "Americans still opt for print books over digital or audio versions; few are in book clubs" at this link.

Please click through and read the entire report because there is A LOT you can learn here, and quite honestly, only you know which parts speak to your local experience, but a few highlights include:

• Print continues to be the only book format used by a majority of Americans.Roughly two-thirds of adults say they have read a physical book in the past 12 months, according to our October survey.
• Much smaller shares say they have read an e-book or listened to an audiobook in the past year.
• While most Americans have read at least one book in the past year, how many they read varies widely. As of October 2025:
• 38% of U.S. adults say they read one to five books in the past year
• 13% read six to 10
• 10% read 11 to 20
• 14% read more than 20
• And 25% of Americans say they read none.
• [Becky addition here: this is sayin 75% of Americans read 1 book!]

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and the survey methodology.

Please click through and especially look at the analysis and methodology which I linked to immediately above this line. It is at the end of the report. 

And finally, don't sleep on the older reports they have done on books and reading. You can access some of them in the right gutter of the report. But also use the menu bar to explore many of their other reports. Remember, we are serving readers and their likes and interests in general are driven by more than their reading habits. Since the Pew Research Center's reports are driven by intellectual curiosity and then focus on human behavior, there is a lot you can learn from many of their reports*

Don't keep your head stuck in a book. We need to be intellectually curious in order to best serve our patrons, to anticipate things they might be interested in by exploring the world outside of books. Go visit the Pew Research Center to stoke that curiosity, find out what Americans in general are thinking about, discover how they act, and then use that knowledge to think about how you are delivering your RA Service in a way that reflects actual behavior.

*This is also why AI cannot do our job. I wrote about this in more detail here.)