The Decline in Reading

Reading for pleasure has dropped tremendously over the past 40 years. It seems no matter what, reading rates keep going down. However, the reading industry and it’s profits have gone the opposite way in the same amount of time.

We found that kids in school start with a love of reading. But once they reach nine-years-old the reading rate dramatically drops and continues dropping every year. We think this is because school curriculums teach kids that reading is a chore.

With the rise off the internet, their isn’t a lot of reasons to pick up a physical book. Why would I want to read a book about skateboarding when I could go on reddit and talk to other skateboarding fanatics?

We think people aren’t reading because there’s not a lot of reading communities (outside of booktok which, is a romance niche). Then, we discovered PewDiePie’s book review series.

If you don’t know PewDiePie, he was a Youtube pioneer and became the first subscribed youtuber to hit 100 million subscribers. He got famous funny edgy gaming Youtube videos. So when we found out he had a book review series, it came out of left field. However, his fans loved it. The 20ish video series has over 67 million views and the comments are filled with people saying how because of him they are back into reading

People aren’t reading because they don’t see anyone in their community talking or interacting with books. So, our big idea is to get influencers, creators, leaders, celebrities who are in non-reading communities, to generate authentic discussions about books related to their interests. i.e. monkey see monkey do.