How Americans Are Reading Across Communities
In Dayton, Nevada, about 50 minutes from Reno, Sadie Clark, a 36-year-old mom of two, juggles a full-time job in telecommunications, household chores, and taking care of her kids. Yet somehow, she finds time to read. A lot. Sadie has read more than 60 books this year — and is on track to finish more than 100. “And I don’t like short reads — nothing less than 300 pages!” she says.
Stories like Sadie’s are encouraging in the face of troubling headlines about a postliterate world and declining student literacy rates over the past decade.
But even if people are reading less, they are still reading.
A survey conducted by Pew Research Center in October 2025 revealed that 75% of American adults read a book, at least partway through, in the previous year. The U.K.’s National Literacy Trust dubbed 2026 as “The Year of Reading,” and book clubs have been on an upswing in the past few years, credited to Gen Z and Millennials eager for social connection and flooded with recommendations from #BookTok and #Bookstagram.
As Miranda Selover Fox, a librarian at an independent school in the Washington, D.C. area (Urban Suburb), puts it, “There’s something about being a reader that’s a ‘thing’ now… It’s like an identity you can inhabit, with a community, and accessories.” This was especially clear to her after visiting an independent bookstore in Florida and seeing shelves of stickers and other visual items for purchase. Miranda describes the hobby of reading in light of such accessories: “It’s become a very aesthetic thing.”
The American Communities Project talked with readers from across the country to better understand what reading looks like in their own communities considering Pew’s data.
Reading Across Community Types
Across the community types represented in Pew’s survey, the range of adults who read was surprisingly narrow, from 70% in Rural Middle America and Hispanic Centers, to 83% in College Towns.
College Towns’ lead in overall reading rates may not be surprising. College Towns skew both younger and highly educated, which are characteristics associated with high reading rates in general: 10% of residents are between 20 and 24, and 38% have at least a bachelor’s degree — 4 points higher than the national average.
That culture of reading in College Towns is evident to residents like Jackie Goodlock, 35, who lives in Columbia, Missouri, and is an internal auditor at the University of Missouri. As she goes about her day, reading is a visible part of her College Town community. “Friends and family frequently share book recommendations, and we’ll discuss our opinions and experiences about books we’ve recently read,” Jackie shares.
How Reading Intensity Varies
How much readers read also varies by community type. While the median among readers across most communities is 4 to 5 books, different patterns emerge when looking at the share of readers who read 11 or more books each year.
While Rural Middle America ranks among the lowest of communities for overall reading, 31% of readers there read 11 or more books in a year. In the African American South, nearly a third of readers also read 11 or more books, despite a lower overall reading rate.
Living in Lyon County, part of Rural Middle America, Sadie acknowledges that her own prolific reading habits feel disconnected from her community: “Reading feels like my own hobby out here. I don’t think my neighbors read much, but to be honest, I don’t know enough people to really bond over that,” Sadie shares.
Lyon County (pop. 59,235) sits just south of Storey County’s Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, a rapidly growing technology and industrial corridor east of Reno that’s attracted major data center development, which is where Sadie’s husband works. The corridor is slated to expand into Lyon County, whose main industries include agriculture, construction/manufacturing, educational services, retail trade, and public administration. In terms of entertainment, outdoor recreation is the most prominent, with Lake Tahoe only about 30 miles west, and about three-quarters of Lyon County is public land. Notably, only 17% of adults age 25 and over have at least a bachelor’s degree, and the median household income is $80,812.
Different Formats for Different Contexts
While Pew found that most readers read print books, e-books and audiobook use have continued to increase since 2020.
Our readers share that the format they prefer often depends on both the content and the context in which they’re reading.
Miranda splits her reading roughly evenly between e-book and print, using e-books when advance reader copies are only available electronically. “I prefer the physical feel of a print book, and I like to be able to flip back and forth. You can do that on a Kindle, but it doesn’t feel the same way tapping,” Miranda explains.
While both Jackie and Sadie enjoy print books, they primarily use digital formats. Jackie reads mostly e-books due to the convenience: “E-books are more accessible and can be read on any device I may have at my literal fingertips.”
Of all formats, audiobook use varies most among ACP’s community types. Rural Middle America has the lowest audiobook use, with only 16% of readers listening to an audiobook. But Sadie says 90% of her reading is through audiobooks. Subscription-based services like Audible make her reading volume more affordable and let her read while cleaning, cooking, or grocery shopping. “I keep an AirPod in my ear about 18 hours a day!” she laughs. She also finds some of her favorite books are improved by immersive narration: “You could feel every emotion because the narrators were so good.”
Reading as a Means of Social Connection
Across all communities, participation in book clubs is relatively low. Only 7% of respondents overall said they participated in a book club in the past year.
Even in College Towns, access to book clubs doesn’t necessarily equate to participation. While Jackie notes an abundance of book clubs offered through her public library or the university, she hasn’t joined one formally, saying, “That seems like too much of a commitment.” Instead, her social connection to books extends largely to friends and family outside her community.
Sadie, who first began reading for leisure in her early 20s after discovering a genre she enjoys, is now a self-proclaimed “romance novel girlie.” She has long wanted to join a book club but isn’t aware of any book clubs or independent bookstores in her area that might host them. Instead, she shares book recommendations with her sister, who lives out of state. Sadie finds reading intellectually fulfilling, like “putting together a giant puzzle.”
Farther south, Deborah Condit owns Books on the Bosque, a community-focused independent bookstore that opened in October 2022 in Albuquerque, part of Bernalillo County, New Mexico (Big City). Today, the store hosts many local authors, speakers, and more than a dozen book clubs each month. The romance book club often has 30 or more attendees. While most clubs cover fiction genres, there is one for nonfiction and another just for kids ages 7 to 11. When reflecting on why people join these clubs, she shares, “I think it’s the community that people really enjoy. People will go out for beers and continue to talk. It’s being around other like-minded people that people enjoy.”
In Urban Suburban Virginia, Miranda says she has also been part of various book clubs and hosts one for students. Since she already reads so much on her own, Miranda explains that the tradeoff of a potentially less interesting book for the community connection is still valuable. “I wanted the community. Having a format to talk to like-minded people where you’re not talking about work, especially in D.C., is a big part of it. I think that’s why people go to book clubs — they want to make friends, talk to people.”
Of all of ACP’s communities, Working Class Country has the lowest book club participation at just 2%. But Jonathan Pitts, a longtime resident of Jones County, Georgia, paints a picture of an engaged community of readers beyond traditional book clubs. In this bedroom community of Macon and Milledgeville, Georgia, with a county population of 29,171, about 20% of residents age 25 and over have at least a bachelor’s degree, and the dominant industries are healthcare, public administration, and small-scale retail.
Here Jonathan’s church is hosting a new reading group this fall for adults that he plans to join. Meanwhile, his company, Piedmont Urgent Care by WellStreet, where he serves as director of client relations, has optional reading circles in which employees can read books about leadership together. He also points to good public library programming and school-based incentives that encourage kids to read at the Jones County Public Library.
Jonathan tries to plant those habits in his own kids through encouragement: “Start with the small things like 20 minutes a day — it gets you in the habit of reading.”
He describes his own adult reading habits as a “rollercoaster” in which there were seasons of his life when he didn’t read as much. But after his pastor suggested he read a book that he really enjoyed, that inspired him to keep reading more than he had before.
Jonathan says reading lets him step outside of his comfort zone and grow personally. His preferred genre tends to be leadership and self-improvement. “Reading helped me become a better leader, father, husband, and community servant,” he shares. In the past three years, he’s read between 6 and 8 books a year.
The Takeaway
Across communities, while the shape of reading habits may vary, the readers we spoke to described reading as a way to connect with other people or perspectives beyond their own.
Deborah puts it simply: “Reading makes you think about people as a whole. It increases your empathy toward others, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes through your imagination, and you can’t get that anywhere else.”
For readers like Sadie, that experience is what keeps the chapters turning. “It’s just an escape,” she says, “to be in someone else’s life or world for a minute.”
Sarah Murphy resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and enjoys writing about the intersection of people, place, and community. In her free time, she also writes poetry.