We live in a golden age of video content, whether it’s TV series funded by streaming networks like Amazon Prime and Netflix or indie Kickstarter-funded movies, of which there are more and more every year. The average person now watches hours and hours of video content every day, and according to Time magazine, although we still watch a lot of broadcast TV, “individuals are spending more hours surfing the web and viewing streaming services.”
The irony? A research study at Yale University found that people who read books have longer lifespans. In fact, “book readers experienced a 20 percent reduction in risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow-up compared to non-book readers.” The effect was marked enough (on average, book readers lived almost two years longer) that the researchers declared that books offer “a significant survival advantage.”
A closer look at the numbers suggests that either everyone’s given up their hobbies in favor of consuming media or that people are just working less (or sleeping less), because not only has consumption of video content and time spent online increased, book buying has also increased annually during the last few years too.
Then again, buying a book and reading a book are two different things. There is a word in Japanese, tsundoku, which refers to “people who buy books and let them pile up, unread.” If you’re one of these people, you’re not alone (there are even support groups for book hoarders). The bad news is that unless you actually read the books, you won’t extend your life.
The world of ebooks isn’t immune to this tsundoku phenomenon either: e-book publisher Jellybooks found that about 45 percent of e-books aren’t even started after being downloaded. A good completion rate is now 70 percent and some genres see less than 20 percent of readers finishing the e-book they start. Jellybooks suggests that readers are generally more likely to finish a plot-driven genre novel than they are a literary one.
And there’s another factor that’s making this read-more-live-longer news worse for Americans: Turns out that we’re way down on the list of nations where people read the most books. At the top of the list are India, Thailand and China, and even Egypt, Turkey and Germany are ahead of the United States, which only ranks #23 according to the World Culture Index.
In recent years we’ve seen more research showing that reading literary fiction increases empathy; and that having children read philosophy can even improve their math scores. So we know that reading is good for us; we’re just not doing enough of it.
The TV can wait. Netflix can wait. YouTube isn’t going anywhere. So pick up a book, curl up in a favorite chair, and give it a shot. Who knows, maybe you’ll not only discover a great story, but also extend your life in the process.
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