The twelfth edition of our Canadian Leisure & Reading Study is now available! Every year we ask Canadian readers about their reading habits: What are their preferred formats? How much time do they spend reading? How many books do they read? And more. We compile all their answers in the full report here. But since you’re here, you can also find some of the top-level highlights below.

About the data

This survey was fielded in January 2025 to 1,211 Canadians over the age of 18 until we had responses from 1,000 respondents who had read or listened to a book or part of a book at least a few times a year in the past year.

Canadians and their free time

The number of Canadians who said they had more than enough leisure time has dropped since 2021 when 35% of Canadians felt that way and is down to 28% in 2024. Canadians were most likely to feel as though they had just enough leisure time for the third year running. And that has been steadily going up, from 45% in 2021 to 53% in 2024. The percentage of those who felt like they had less than enough leisure time also went up last year, from 22% in 2023 to 24% in 2024.

Canadians are using their leisure time in 2024 much the same as they did in 2023. The top three leisure and recreational activities done by Canadians at least weekly in 2024 were:

Watching videos/TV/movies (90%)
Cooking (88%)
Browsing social media/web (87%)

If we drill down to just reading or listening to books, we find that 78% of Canadians chose to use at least some of their leisure time in 2024 with a book — this has been fairly steady over the last several years.

A third of readers prefer reading or listening to books over other leisure activities (33%). Though most said they sometimes prefer reading to other activities (40%) and 23% said they don’t mind reading books, but would prefer doing other things instead.

We asked readers for their top three reasons that they generally choose to read or listen to books. When we put their responses all together, we found that the top five reasons readers read or listened to books in 2024 were:

For enjoyment / entertainment (53%)
To relax or for comfort (50%)
For brain health (improve memory, prevent diseases) (29%)
To learn things or improve things (for school/study/work or personal) (27%)
To become immersed in another world or to escape reality (26%)

Highlights

Here are some of the points of interest that stood out to us while we were looking at the data:

The percentage of readers who read at least once a day jumped 5% between 2023 and 2024 to 43% and moved ahead of exercising and working out on the list of leisure activities that readers do at least once a day.
Just under half of all readers read between one and five books in 2024 (45%). Just under a third (29%) read or listened to 6-11 books, which was up 4% over 2023, and 19% read or listened to 12-49 books, up 4% compared with 2023.
Canadian book readers continued making reading a shared experience: 45% read all or part of a book aloud to another person (a child, young adult, or adult) and 27% shared either the experience, the book, or a photo of the book with others.
More readers said they chose books within their budget in 2024 (46%) than they did in 2023 (44%).
The percentage of readers who prefer audiobooks continues to rise — from 8% in 2020 to 15% in 2024.
Half of Canadian readers want to know where books are printed or shipped from (50%).
The majority of readers prefer listening to a human narrator over synthetic (AI) narration (81%).

To get all the details, you can read the whole report for free here: booknetcanada.ca/canadian-leisure-and-reading-study-2024