Many adults who have drifted away from books have not stopped reading. In a 2024 survey by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, about six in ten people aged 16 and over said they read no books in a typical month, and three quarters of that group said they read posts, articles or other text almost every day.¹ The words still arrive, in short pieces, on a screen, between other things.

So the usual advice to “find time” misses the real problem. For most people working out how to build a reading habit, the minutes already exist; what is missing is a fixed place for a book in the day, claimed before the phone gets there. The plan comes down to five moves:

1. Choose a page count small enough for your worst evening
2. Hang the book on a moment you already have
3. Put the book where the phone usually sits
4. Match the format to the book
5. Read what you want, and quit what you don’t

Picture someone who has not finished a book in a year. Their version could be 20 pages straight after the evening meal, always in the same chair, with the book left on the seat all day and the phone charging in the hallway. On a long day, five pages still count.

Book reading is low in many countries and falling in the US

National surveys in the European Union and Japan find many adults reading no books at all, and US time-use data show daily reading for pleasure falling steadily over two decades. In the American Time Use Survey, the share of US residents who read for pleasure on a given day fell from about 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.²

That figure comes from a 2025 analysis of two decades of the survey’s nationally representative time diaries by a US and UK team led by Jessica Bone, funded in part by the US National Endowment for the Arts. The survey counts magazines, newspapers, e-readers and audiobooks as reading for pleasure, so the fall is not simply books moving to other formats. Put plainly, reading for pleasure has gone from something a sizable minority of Americans did on a typical day to something a small minority does.²

Europe shows wide gaps rather than one trend. In Eurostat’s 2022 survey, nearly half of EU residents had read no book in the previous year, with far fewer non-readers in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Luxembourg and Sweden than in parts of southern and eastern Europe.³

Reading skill has also stalled. Adult literacy declined or stagnated over the past decade in most OECD countries, according to the OECD’s 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, and only Finland and Denmark improved significantly.⁴ Neither finding shows that reading fewer books caused the weaker skills. If you live elsewhere, your national statistics office or library body may publish its own figures.

The everyday version is familiar: the half hour after dinner that once went to a novel now goes to a feed that never ends. A book is competing with other reading, not with an empty evening, so the habit needs a slot the phone does not already own.

Why 20 pages a day works as a target

Twenty pages a day is a rule of thumb, not a research finding; no study has tested it. It works as a target because it is small enough to finish on most evenings, large enough to add up over a year, and short in time: about 20 to 25 minutes at typical adult reading speeds on an ordinary paperback page, as the sums below show.

The timing comes from a 2019 review by Marc Brysbaert, which pooled studies of reading rate and estimated that adults silently read English at roughly 240 to 260 words a minute, a little faster for fiction than for nonfiction.⁵ Pages vary, so the honest way to set your own target is to count the words on one page of the book in your hands.

That daily half hour is close to what the heaviest readers reported in a US study of older adults discussed below: 3.5 hours or more of books a week, a dose the authors called a chapter a day.⁶ Treat twenty pages as a floor, not a ceiling. Among Americans who did read for pleasure on their diary day in 2023, half read for an hour or more.² The study did not ask why, but it hints that for many readers the hard part is opening the book, not carrying on. For dense books, where twenty pages can take an hour, set the target in minutes instead.

How to build a reading habit, one evening at a time

The five moves run in the order you set them up: first the size of the target and the moment it follows, then the setting, the format and the choice of book.

1. Choose a page count small enough for your worst evening

Pick a daily number of pages you could manage even when tired, and grow toward the full target if it feels like a stretch. A 2016 review of reading research led by Keith Rayner concluded that the way to read faster without understanding less is practice and a larger vocabulary, so the daily count may get easier over the months.⁷

Our suggestion for bad days is a smaller fallback, such as five pages, so the day still counts; no study has tested it. The point is to protect the slot on the evenings when motivation is lowest.

2. Hang the book on a moment you already have

Attach reading to something that happens daily at a predictable point: after the evening meal, on the train home, or once you get into bed. A fixed moment is what lets the action start without a decision, as the research on how habits form explains. “After I clear the table, I read in the armchair” names both the cue and the place.

3. Put the book where the phone usually sits

Leave the book in the spot your phone normally occupies, and move the phone somewhere else for reading time. The Japanese survey found most people who read no books still reading other text, such as social media posts and online articles, almost every day.¹ The survey did not ask about devices, so treating the phone as the main rival for the slot is our inference. Moving the cue works better than resisting it, the idea behind changing the setting to break a habit.

4. Match the format to the book

Keep factual, dense books on paper where you can, and read them without a deadline in view: the 2018 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary described in the next section found that the paper advantage grew when reading time was limited.⁸ Save the e-reader or phone for novels, where no clear difference has been found. Audiobooks can carry the habit through a commute: in a small 2016 randomized study of 91 people, comprehension of a nonfiction chapter showed no clear difference between listeners and those who read it on a tablet.⁹ If you want to remember what you read, taking notes from books covers the best-tested methods.

5. Read what you want, and quit what you don’t

The research linking reading to better comprehension is about leisure reading, the kind people do by choice in their free time. Mol and Bus, whose review is described below, found that even weaker readers appeared to benefit from it.¹⁰ Our suggestion, untested like the fallback, is to drop a book that has stalled, because a book you dread can become a reason to reach for the phone. Struggling to stay with any long book is a separate question about attention, which a planned WiserHours focus article will take up.

WiserHours

Before your first evening of reading

• Count the words on one page and set a daily page target
• Pick a fallback for bad days, such as five pages
• Choose the daily moment reading will follow
• Leave the book where you will sit
• Put the phone in another room during reading time
• Keep dense books on paper and novels on any device
• Give yourself permission to drop a book that has stalled

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/habits/reading-habit/#checklist-reading-habit-plan

Paper or screen: what the comprehension studies found

For informational texts, paper has a small, consistent edge over screens; for stories, studies find no clear difference. Pablo Delgado’s team reached that verdict in a 2018 meta-analysis pooling studies that compared comparable texts read on paper and on digital devices.

The study

Moderate evidence

Paper or tablet? What 54 comprehension studies add up to (2018)

People understood texts better on paper than on screens, a small effect (Hedges’ g of -0.21) that appeared in studies comparing different people and the same people. The paper advantage was larger when reading time was limited than when people read at their own pace. It held for informational texts and mixed texts, but not for texts that were only stories, and it grew in more recently published studies.⁸

An effect of that size is easy to miss in a single evening’s reading, and it shows up mainly with factual texts. Virginia Clinton’s 2019 review of 33 randomized experiments reached a similar verdict: the screen disadvantage appeared limited to expository texts, with no difference for narrative ones, reading took about as long on either, and readers judged their own understanding more accurately on paper.¹¹

1. Factual texts: across comprehension studies, people understood informational texts somewhat better on paper than on screens; the difference was small
2. Stories: for texts that were only narrative, the reviews found no clear difference between paper and screens
3. Time pressure: the paper advantage was larger when reading time was limited than when people read at their own pace

In practice, a novel on an e-reader is a fine way to keep the habit going. A dense book for work is worth reading on paper, or on a screen with the notifications off and no clock running.

What regular book reading is linked to

Regular book reading is linked to better reading comprehension and, in one large US study of older adults, to longer survival. Both links come from observational studiesobservational study: A study in which researchers record what people already do or are exposed to, rather than assigning anyone to anything. It can show that two things go together, not that one causes the other, because the groups being compared may differ in other ways as well.Full entry in the glossary: people who read books differ from those who do not in ways a survey cannot fully untangle, so these are possible benefits, not promised ones.

The survival finding comes from Yale. Avni Bavishi, Martin Slade and Becca Levy followed several thousand US adults aged over 50 from the national Health and Retirement Study, who had reported their weekly reading in a mail survey first run in 2001, until the end of 2012. During follow-up, 33 percent of people who read no books died, compared with 27 percent of book readers, and the gap held after the authors adjusted for factors including age, sex, education, wealth, health and depression. Reading newspapers and magazines was linked to a much smaller advantage than reading books.⁶

The caveats matter. Reading was self-reported once, at the start, and adjustment cannot rule out every difference between readers and non-readers. The authors also note that earlier studies of reading and mortality were mixed, some finding a link and others none.⁶ Treat longer life as a possible bonus of reading, not a reason to force yourself through books.

The link with reading skill is better established, and it appears to run both ways. In a study by a Finnish university team that followed pupils from first to ninth grade, weaker readers in the first school years went on to read less for pleasure, while later on, more leisure reading, particularly of books, predicted better comprehension.¹² A 2011 meta-analysis by Suzanne Mol and Adriana Bus, pooling studies from preschool to university, found the link between leisure reading and reading skill growing stronger with age, up to and including university students.¹⁰ Screens look like a weaker route: a 2023 meta-analysis found leisure reading on screens only weakly linked to comprehension overall, well short of the medium-sized links earlier research had found for print, though the link turned positive for high school and university students.¹³

If you come back to books after years of feeds, the first weeks may feel slower than you remember. That would fit the two-way link above, which was measured in pupils and students, and it points to more reading rather than more willpower.

Which parts of this advice rest on data, and which on arithmetic

The trend data are the firmest part of the evidence; the benefits are observational and the 20-page target is arithmetic, not a finding.

None of these studies tracked adults building a new reading habit, so the five moves are reasonable bets drawn from habit research and reading research, not a tested program. Try them for a few weeks and keep the ones that hold.

The bottom line

The hard part of a reading habit is the minute before the first page, when the book and the phone compete for the same slot. Give books a fixed moment after something you already do, leave the phone charging elsewhere while you read, and start with a page count small enough for a tired evening. Put demanding books on paper, drop the ones you dread, and raise the count once opening the book no longer takes a decision.