19 minutes. That is how long young French people aged 7 to 19 spend reading for leisure each day, according to the French CNL/Ipsos study 'Les jeunes Français et la lecture' published in April 2024. Over the same period, they spend 3 hours and 11 minutes a day in front of screens, ten times more. Two figures that sum up, on their own, the balance of power between books and smartphones in the younger generation.
Should we bury reading among young people for good? Not so fast. Behind the alarming averages, the survey also reveals encouraging signals: reading for pleasure has not disappeared, and new formats are bringing teenagers back to books. Here is what the numbers really say, age group by age group, and what parents and educators can do about it.
What the April 2024 CNL/Ipsos study measures
France's Centre national du livre (CNL) regularly commissions Ipsos to run a large survey on the reading habits of 7-19 year olds. The edition published in April 2024 (source: centrenationaldulivre.fr) delivers an unequivocal finding: French 7-19 year olds read an average of 19 minutes a day in their leisure time, 4 minutes less than in 2022. So the trend is not just low: it is heading downward.
On the other side, screen time for the same 7-19 year olds reaches 3 hours and 11 minutes a day, ten times more than leisure reading time. For every minute spent in a book, ten minutes are spent in front of a screen. We devoted a full article to this unequal duel between screens and reading https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/blog/temps-ecran-contre-lecture-chiffres.
Ages 16-19: the great drop-off
The most worrying figure in the study concerns the oldest group. Among French 16-19 year olds, leisure reading time falls to 12 minutes a day, while screen time exceeds 5 hours. It is the age when the smartphone becomes personal, when social media takes center stage in social life, and when reading assigned by school often eclipses reading by choice.
| Age group | Leisure reading per day | Screens per day |
|---|---|---|
| Ages 7-19 (average) | 19 minutes (4 minutes less than in 2022) | 3 h 11 min |
| Ages 16-19 | 12 minutes | more than 5 hours |
This teenage drop-off is not new, but its scale raises questions: reading is not just losing ground to screens, it is becoming a residual activity, squeezed into the gaps left by the phone. To put these figures in the wider context of reading in France, our full overview is here https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/blog/combien-de-livres-lisent-les-francais.
Reading with the phone nearby: fragmented reading
Another lesson, this time from the French CNL/Ipsos 2025 barometer on reading: 53% of 15-24 year olds say they do something else while reading, most often checking their phone. Even when the book wins the battle for attention, it only wins half of it: reading becomes a fragmented activity, interrupted by notifications.
This may be the most revealing figure of all: the problem is not just the time devoted to reading, it is the quality of the attention given to it. Reading interrupted every two pages produces neither the same comprehension nor the same pleasure as continuous reading, which in turn feeds the feeling that reading is boring.
This battle for attention is anything but a fair fight. On one side, a silent object that demands an effort to get started; on the other, apps designed by thousands of engineers to capture and hold attention, with notifications, autoplay and unpredictable rewards. Blaming teenagers therefore makes little sense: on equal terms, the book starts with a heavy handicap. That is also why pure injunctions (just go read) almost always fail, and why the strategies that work act on the environment: phone-free moments, adapted formats, and reading offers that live where the attention already is.
The reassuring signals
The picture is not uniformly dark, however. The CNL survey highlights it: reading for pleasure remains an activity that a large share of young people enjoy. When they read, they like it. The problem is less a rejection of books than the overwhelming competition from screens for available time.
Another reason for hope, to be taken with caution because the phenomenon remains hard to quantify: online reading communities, BookTok first among them, have put books back at the heart of teenage conversations and are bringing some young people back to bookshops. Paradoxically, the screen can also lead back to the book. Short formats (short stories, manga, short novels, summaries) play the same gateway role: they lower the step between not reading at all and a reading habit.
What can be done? Three concrete paths
1. Bet on short formats and micro-sessions. Demanding that a teenager used to 30-second videos sit through two hours of a novel is the best way to put them off. Starting with 10 to 15 minutes a day, with short texts, builds the habit painlessly. That is the whole principle of microlearning, which we detail here https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/blog/microapprentissage-apprendre-15-minutes-par-jour.
2. Lead by example. A young person who sees their parents read regularly comes to see reading as a normal, desirable, adult activity. Conversely, parents glued to their phones who order their kids to drop the screen and read send a contradictory message that teenagers decode perfectly. Shared reading moments, for instance a quarter of an hour when the whole family reads, each with their own book, often do more than any injunction.
3. Meet young people where they are: on their phones. Rather than pitting the book against the smartphone head-on, you can turn the latter into an ally of the former. That is the Cobalt take on microlearning: book summaries that can be read in about ten minutes, designed for digital habits (short sessions, mobile format), which build a taste for ideas and, often, the desire to read the full book.
The key takeaways
The figures from the April 2024 French CNL/Ipsos study are serious: 19 minutes of leisure reading a day among 7-19 year olds versus 3 hours 11 minutes of screens, and a marked drop-off among 16-19 year olds (12 minutes versus more than 5 hours). But nothing suggests young people have stopped enjoying reading: above all, they have stopped finding the time and attention for it. Short formats, parental example and tools adapted to their habits can reverse the trend, a quarter of an hour at a time.
To turn a few minutes of screen time into minutes of ideas, Cobalt offers book summaries you can read in about ten minutes, right on your phone: the catalog is at https://www.cobaltapp.io/fr/resumes and the app can be downloaded at https://www.cobaltapp.io/download.