According to the National Literacy Trust report for 2025, just 33% of young people said that they enjoyed reading, while only 19% said that they read daily. Both figures are the lowest ever reported since the surveys started in 2005.
Similar trends have been noted in the United States, where a Gallup survey from 2022 showed that people are reading fewer books than ever before.
It may be that future dictators will have no need to burn books, since hardly anybody will be reading them. They will only have to control the most popular internet sites. However, the Guardian recently reported that the bookseller Waterstones had increased their sales and profits, so maybe the situation isn’t as bad as we might think.
It is often remarked that the modern world is restless and obsessed by the search for new sensations, but this is by no means a purely contemporary trend. As the 19th century poet Matthew Arnold wrote, describing a bored rich Roman:
In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,
The Roman noble lay;
He drove abroad, in furious guise,
Along the Appian way.
He made a feast, drank fierce and fast,
And crown’d his hair with flowers –
No easier nor no quicker pass’d
The impracticable hours.
Matthew Arnold based these lines on earlier ones by the Epicurean Roman poet Lucretius (from De Rerum Natura, translated by William Ellery Leonard):
The man who sickens of his home goes out,
Forth from his splendid halls, and straight — returns,
Feeling in faith no better off abroad.
He races, driving his Gallic ponies along,
Down to his villa, madly, — as in haste
To hurry help to a house afire. At once
He yawns, as soon as foot has touched the threshold,
Or drowsily goes off in sleep and seeks
Forgetfulness, or maybe bustles about
And makes for town again.
Lucretius recommended the study of nature and the philosophy of Epicurus as an antidote from this sense of boredom and restlessness, while Matthew Arnold probably have recommended Christianity, despite being well aware of its fading appeal.