Listen in as we give you some of the highlights from our forthcoming report, Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2025, releasing May 5. We also see if some recent reading trends that have made headlines are true for Canadians. We’ve even included some data we didn’t get to use in the study.
(Scroll down for the transcript.)
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Transcript
Ainsley Sparkes: Hello everyone, and welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I'm Ainsley Sparkes, your host for this episode.
As you may know, BookNet runs a Canadian Leisure & Reading survey every year where we ask Canadians about their leisure activities — how do they spend their time when they’re not working or doing dishes? We then take the subset of Canadians who said they spent at least some time in the past year reading a book and we ask them further questions about the kinds of books they’re reading, how they discover them, where they buy them, and so on.
In this month’s episode, we’re going to give you a bit of a sneak peak at this data — the full report will be released on May 5. But we’re also going to share a bit that’s not included in the report with you, our lucky listener.
So first, what are Canadians doing with their free time? Well mostly they’re watching things. They’re watching TV, videos, or movies, they’re on the internet, browsing the web or on social media, and they’re cooking. Those top three activities remain the largest share of Canadians' leisure activities over the past several years.
But Canadians are also spending part of their leisure time reading. We found that 79% of Canadians read a book in 2025. I dug up the last 10 years of data to see what that trend looks like, and while it’s true that the percentage of Canadians who read at least one book a year has been trending down since 2015, the drop is not as precipitous as one might think. In 2015, 84% of Canadians reported reading a book that year, and 10 years later, in 2025, 79% of Canadians read a book. And, if we only look at the last five years, the trend is heading back up, not a lot, again, but it’s not going down.
If we drill down a bit more to frequency, half of Canadians spend at least some of their leisure time in a week reading a book.
You may have seen the headlines last summer about the 40% decline in daily reading for pleasure for Americans over the last 20 years, and while our study doesn’t capture exactly the same data as the report out of the University of Florida and University College London, we can take a look at some similar data.
Since we first started collecting data about overall reading frequency in 2019, we’ve found that the share of Canadians who read daily has hovered around a third. So we aren’t seeing the 3% annual decrease that they found in the American Time Use Survey. Though this isn’t exactly apples to apples, they’re looking at reading for pleasure only and we ask about reading or listening to books in general, so work or school reading would be captured in our data.
However, we do ask our survey respondents to choose their three main reasons for reading. And “for enjoyment or entertainment” has been the number one reason for reading since 2019. “To relax or for comfort” was the second most popular answer and “to become immersed in another world or to escape reality” was the third most popular. You could arguably group those three categories as reading for pleasure. And it is true that the percentage of people who identified these as their top three reasons to read was at its highest in 2019 and 2020, declined in 2022, but since then they’ve all started trending upwards. And it will be interesting to keep an eye on them going forward.
So, I think it would be fair to say, overall, that we’re not seeing the same dramatic decreases in daily reading for pleasure in Canada as was found in the Americans Time Use Survey.
Interestingly, reading “to learn things or improve things (for school/study/work or personal)” has been trending down since 2019, but reading “for brain health ([to] improve memory, prevent diseases)” has been trending up. Those two reasons have been trading off on fourth and fifth place since 2019.
It’s not all doom and gloom reporting about reading habits. There’s also been some good news headlines about younger generations turning to analog hobbies or at least activities that keep them from doomscrolling, like reading. And this is the bit that’s not in the report, though perhaps we’ll explore it further on the BookNet blog this spring. The site The Conversation states that 57% to 61% of Gen Z and millennials identify as readers. And while we’re not sure how our survey respondents would identify, per se (do they consider themselves readers or did they just read last year, for example) we can see that in 2025, 92% of 18- to 29-year-olds read at least once. This is the highest percentage for that age bracket from 2019. Just over half of 18- to 29-year-olds read at least once a week in 2025 — 55% — and about a third read at least daily. Both of those reading frequencies had some declines in the pandemic years (2020 and 2021) but have been slowly climbing from 2022.
The number of books that the 18- to 29-year-olds are reading is also going up. In 2021, when we first started asking about the number of books read, 60% of 18- to 29-year-olds were reading from 1 to 5 books in a year. This has gone down to 45% in 2025. Now, more of this age group is reading between 6 and 11 books a year. It’s gone from 25% of this age group in 2021 to 37% in 2025. It seems like the kids are alright.
In more good news, that we hope will make some headlines, Canadians have also been choosing to read more books by or about Canadians or locals in 2025 than in the past five years and this has been trending up over that time period, from 28% in 2021 to 35% in 2025.
There’s so much more in the free report, so be sure to read it when it comes out on May 5. If you want to be reminded when it’s out sign up to our weekly eNews newsletter or our monthly research newsletter. Links are in the show notes. The report covers where readers are getting their books, their format preferences, the amount they’re spending on books and their perception of their value for money, and so much more.
Before I go, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada's operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations (which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie), the Métis, as well as the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh peoples, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Vaughan, and Windsor.
We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the people whose lands you are listening from today. Moreover, BookNet Canada endorses the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry.
We would also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund, and of course, thanks to you for listening.
Listen in as we give you some of the highlights from our forthcoming report, Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2025.