It is the silent battle of our decade: the one that pits, every evening, the book on the nightstand against the phone lying right next to it. Official data now makes it possible to measure precisely who is winning. Spoiler: it is not the book. Here is what the CNL/Ipsos 2025 barometer on the French and reading says, along with the CNL/Ipsos 2024 study devoted to young people.
23h27 of screen time per week, 3h40 of reading
In their free time, outside work and studies, French people spend 23 hours and 27 minutes per week in front of a screen, 49 minutes more than in 2023 and the equivalent of a full day every week. Leisure reading, by contrast, accounts for 3 hours and 40 minutes per week, down 1 hour and 7 minutes in two years. The ratio is roughly one to six.
Among under-25s, the gap becomes a chasm: up to 35 hours of screen time per week, around 3 hours and 21 minutes per day, while their weekly reading fits into the same amount of time they devote to screens in a single day.
Among young people: 10 times more screens than books
The study 'Young French People and Reading', published by the CNL in April 2024, puts figures on the phenomenon among 7-19 year olds: 19 minutes of leisure reading per day on average (4 minutes less than in 2022), versus 3 hours and 11 minutes of daily screen time. Ten times more.
The peak is reached among 16-19 year olds: 12 minutes of reading per day, against more than 5 hours of screens. At this pivotal age, when adult cultural habits take shape, the book is slipping out of everyday life.
Attention itself is fragmenting
The most revealing figure may not be the stolen time but what happens during reading: 27% of readers do something else while reading (messages, social media), a proportion that climbs to 53% among 15-24 year olds and 42% among 25-34 year olds. And only 62% of French people say they can read for 30 minutes straight without losing focus.
So it is not just that we read less: our capacity to read for long stretches, the deep attention Cal Newport describes in Deep Work, is weakening as distractions multiply. Our summary of Deep Work explores exactly this mechanism: https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/resumes/deep-work
The imbalance in one table
| Indicator | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Screens (leisure), all French people | 23h27 / week | CNL/Ipsos 2025 |
| Reading, all French people | 3h40 / week | CNL/Ipsos 2025 |
| Screens, under-25s | up to 35h / week | CNL/Ipsos 2025 |
| Daily reading, 7-19 year olds | 19 min / day | CNL/Ipsos 2024 |
| Daily screens, 7-19 year olds | 3h11 / day | CNL/Ipsos 2024 |
| Daily reading, 16-19 year olds | 12 min / day | CNL/Ipsos 2024 |
| Readers who do something else while reading (15-24) | 53% | CNL/Ipsos 2025 |
Sources: https://centrenationaldulivre.fr/donnees-cles/les-francais-et-la-lecture-en-2025 and https://centrenationaldulivre.fr/donnees-cles/les-jeunes-francais-et-la-lecture-en-2024
Taking back 15 minutes a day from screens
The good news in these figures is their scale: there is no question of giving up screens, only of reclaiming a tiny fraction of those 23 hours. Fifteen minutes a day is enough to read a complete summary of a non-fiction book and walk away with ideas you can apply. That is the microlearning principle Cobalt stands for: replacing a moment of passive scrolling with a moment of learning, on the same device, with the same gesture.
Our summaries can be read in 5 to 20 minutes depending on the depth you choose, listened to in audio and accessed offline: https://www.cobaltapp.io/download. The screen is not the enemy of reading, it is its new territory, provided you fill it with something other than noise.