{"id":12901,"date":"2025-07-21T12:15:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T12:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/12901\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T12:15:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T12:15:09","slug":"young-men-not-reading-books-but-publishers-arent-helping-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/12901\/","title":{"rendered":"Young men not reading books but publishers aren\u2019t helping"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was sitting in my hotel room in Tasmania when news came through last week that Australians, but especially men, are reading less than ever before.<\/p>\n

According to the new data<\/a> from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the most common group of regular readers are now older women (48 per cent), compared with just 10.1 per cent of males aged 15 to 24. Given I\u2019d just been at a book event where the crowd was predominantly female, and older too, this seemed to track.<\/p>\n

\"Brandon<\/p>\n

Brandon Jack played 28 AFL games over five seasons for the Sydney Swans and has just published his second book.Credit: Tim Bauer<\/p>\n

Despite now being a full-time writer, I was not the bookish type growing up. It wasn\u2019t until I came across Irvine Welsh\u2019s Trainspotting in my mid-20s that the reading flame was ignited. From Welsh, I bounced to Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, George Saunders and Charles Bukowski. My horizons have broadened since then, but they were the first literary loves that I held.<\/p>\n

Reading is sometimes a chore, sometimes an experience that distracts me from the world and comforts me when I feel there is no one else around.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s well established that a love of reading sits in that nature-nurture Venn diagram. Access to books growing up, a moment of encouragement from a teacher, an internal spark with no rhyme or reason all help kids develop a love of reading. For many people, though, a connection with fiction is formed when a character says or thinks something that you have yourself said or thought.<\/p>\n

Loading<\/p>\n

So why are young men reading less? Perhaps podcasts are the culprit. A book is something to be consumed, yes, but it\u2019s something to sit with and endure; to give time and effort towards. In the modern age, maybe podcasts, YouTube, Reddit forums and streamers have become that \u2013 the window of time for entertainment has been given to things which are easier to consume.<\/p>\n

Or is chick-lit to blame? A string of generationally popular female authors captured the zeitgeist and spawned a mass of imitators thanks to social media, which has now moved to a new generation of romance and smut authors. Five of Australia\u2019s 10 best-selling books in 2024 fit into this category (the others were two cookbooks, a children\u2019s book, a self-help book and John Farnham\u2019s memoir).<\/p>\n

The percentage of men who would pick up any book at all is very small. The odds of them picking up or recommending Liane Moriarty or Sarah J. Maas (whose books were third and sixth on the bestseller list) to their mates is even smaller. Now it\u2019s become a torrid cycle of supply and demand. No men read books, so no books get pushed to them. Dare I say it, there is no \u201cdick-lit\u201d (copyright: B Jack).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was sitting in my hotel room in Tasmania when news came through last week that Australians, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-12901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}