Readers select from a wide range of extended texts, including but not exclusive to narrative fiction, nonfiction, picture books, e-books, magazines, social media, blogs, websites, newspapers, comic books, and graphic novels. Leisure reading is generally intrinsically or socially motivated and a pleasurable activity for the reader.
A research report of National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) revealed that people, including teenagers and young adults, have spent fewer hours on reading, and they’ve read less for pleasure.
It seems reasonable that students from K1 to colleges are more accustomed to digital devices than their parents, and they would rather spend more time on Instagram and Tik Tok than books. In fact, besides consumer electronics and popular mobile applications, there’re way more factors responsible for the reading time decline, and we’ll explore them in this article.
NEA’s research report also pointed out that reading for pleasure correlates strongly with academic achievement, including reading, writing, math, science and history performances. Compared to the “reading less” fact, this conclusion may be surprising to most students and parents.
How can pleasure reading contribute to better educational performance?
The relationship between reading for pleasure and wellbeing is particularly interesting, with evidence showing a correlation between reading for pleasure regularly and lower levels of stress and depression. Reading also seems to reduce the risk of dementia, with frequent readers having lower incidence of dementia in later life.
— “Why is reading for pleasure important?”, The Reading Agency
Erin M. Watson studied the reading patterns of 1,800 students in health sciences professional programs at the University of Saskatchewan in 2010 and published a report in 2015.
Most participants in this research said that leisure reading helped them in the following ways:
- Increase empathy.
- Improve understanding of minority groups.
- Reduce stress.
- Enhance thinking and communication skills.
Another research conducted for the Reading Agency by BOP Consulting found that pleasure reading could also result in more benefits, including:
- Improved relationships with others.
- Reductions in the symptoms of depression and dementia.
- Improved wellbeing.
In conclusion, leisure reading can improve students’ mental health and helps them see the world from different perspectives, contributing to a better connection with others.
Why recreational reading becomes less popular among teenagers and college students?
Even though voluntary reading can help students achieve higher academic performance according to NAE’s report, students in Watson’s research said that they were refrained from reading for fun mainly because of time shortage, fatigue and limited financial budget for reading materials.
James Webb, an AHS English teacher, once shared his view on students’ reading patterns and believed that “the culture is so digital that it’s all about immediate gratification.” In addition to this kind of standard view, some students believe that they don’t read a lot because it’s hard to find reading materials that perfectly match their preferences.
Make Reading for Fun Popular Again
The author of “The Importance of Leisure Reading for Students and How Libraries Can Help” suggests that academic libraries can increase the availability and awareness of leisure reading material to help students read more for fun. Libraries should provide students with more magazines, fictions and newspapers in both printed and digital formats to increase their accessibility to recreational reading materials.
Besides, teenagers and young adults can read with a handy eReader to slash their expenses on paper materials and find more ebooks to read.
A study report of NEA published in March this year concluded that younger adult readers are more likely to read via digital/audio format. Compared to print-only readers, digital/audio readers are more likely to participate in reading groups and do creative writing.
Referring to reading digital materials, especially fiction and other recreational books, most of our users will think of BOOX Poke3. As the only 6’’ eReader running Android 10.0 in the market, Poke3 is made for leisure reading.
BOOX’s built-in reading app, Neoreader, can handle more than 30 types of file formats, but due to Poke3’s small-size screen, it is more suitable for reading reflowable materials, such as ePub and Mobi.
When using Poke3, students can set up typography, font size, padding and margin, orientation, and text and image contrast on the reflowable ebooks, so that they can customize the best display of content and enjoy pleasure reading with such a tiny, handy device.
When students download and sideload free ebooks on their Poke3, they can save significant expenses on real books. Also, among the full range of BOOX models, Poke3 is offered at the most affordable price, which helps users with limited budgets to read ebooks on an advanced device with Android OS.
You can buy a Poke3 set with free accessories now, including an ultrathin magnetic wake-up protective case with three optional colors. Most of the female buyers chose the brown case to add a graceful hint to their BOOX. Check it out here.
If teens and young adults read more nonfiction, picture books, magazines and other pleasure reading materials, bigger-size E Ink devices can be more suitable.
BOOX’s 7.8’’ Nova3 is different from Poke3 in terms of size and feature: Nova2 supports note-taking. When reading fiction on Nova3, students can add annotations and take notes on the digital file with a stylus to reserve their ideas.
Besides, 10.3’’ Note3 and 13.3’’ Max Lumi provide a larger display for pictures. Recreational reading materials, such as A4-size magazines and ebooks with many illustrations, can be shown with fewer detailed losses on Note3’s and Max Lumi’s big screen with 16 greyscales.
Moreover, Resource barriers can never happen in BOOX products. Users can use many third-party reading apps, such as Kindle, Kobo, Moon+ Reader, Libby and Nook, to read ebooks. In this way, teens can get books through all platforms and break the limitation of content resources.
BOOX wants to advocate leisure reading and helps our users, especially teens and young adults, to achieve better mental condition and boost mutual understanding in people.
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