Book buying is soaring. So why aren't people reading them?

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The statistics might lie but men still should not hide behind their lads' mags

Bookshops sell titles worth £2.1bn a year, publishers regularly offer seven-figure advances and writers from Salman Rushdie to J K Rowling are considered not so much authors as superstars.

The fiction business has never been bigger – sales are growing by 4 per cent a year – and an obvious assumption is that the boom is being driven by a nation spending more and more time with its nose in a bestseller.

Wrong. Distracted by television, the internet, newspapers and magazines, Britons are in fact spending only 11 minutes a day reading a work of fiction – less than they spend microwaving their dinners.

Add to that the fact that 40 per cent of the population never read books and a household is more likely to have two cars than two regular novel readers, and Britain's literary health no longer seems so rude.

The statistics are published today in the first national survey to gauge how much leisure time in 21st-century Britain is spent in the time-honoured activity of reading.

The three-month study of the reading habits of 400 adults found that a population dealing with increasingly bite-sized chunks of spare time no longer wants to invest long periods reading a novel.

Instead, readers spend twice as long (22 minutes a day) poring over a newspaper or a glossy magazine than they will the latest Martin Amis, A S Byatt, Danielle Steel or Irvine Welsh.

They are also spending seven minutes a day browsing the World Wide Web and eight minutes reading a work of non-fiction or a reference book. Even then, the grand total of 48 minutes a day spent reading by the typical Briton is dwarfed by the 3.5 hours he or she will pass in front of the television and the three hours spent listening to the radio.

According to experts, the study of 200 couples' reading habits, completed for the Orange prize for women authors to be awarded next month, shows the novel is being squeezed by a revolution in lifestyles.

Dr Jenny Hartley, principal lecturer in English Literature at Roehampton University, who analysed the survey findings, said: "The days of a family sitting around reading for an evening are long gone.

"People have less spare time and more things to do with it. If you are running around, you are more likely to grab a paper for a few minutes or dip in and out of a glossy magazine. If you watch television, you are going to be watching a programme that lasts for a minimum of 30 minutes. The remaining time for a novel is, it seems, increasingly minimal."

The study found that novels were widely considered a "luxury item", according to Dr Hartley. Nearly 20 per cent of people only read a novel when they were on holiday while just 4 per cent read a book while commuting to the office. Dr Hartley said: "A novel is becoming seen as self-indulgent. Where people might read a newspaper over breakfast, very few will think about reading a novel. There is a puritanical attitude towards books."

Given the boom in book sales – up 25 per cent since 1990 – the fact that Britons are spending just six hours a week poring over all types of reading material for pleasure or information might seem counter-intuitive. One explanation, according to the Orange prize study, which was researched by a London-based company, Book Marketing, is that while people are buying more books, they are failing to read them.

About 70 per cent said they had abandoned a book and an average of one book in 10 goes unread. Evidence for the negative trend in reading was provided by an Audit Commission report on public libraries earlier this month which suggested that book loans had fallen by a quarter in the past decade and spending by libraries on new volumes had dropped by a third.

It warned that libraries were in danger of become ghettos for the poor while the wealthy middle class sought its reading matter in the new generation of high-street book superstores.

In an attempt to reverse the decline in interest in literature, the Government has introduced a compulsory daily reading hour for primary schools and the first two years of secondary school.

This, in part, is an attempt to address the "reading gap" between the 60 per cent of people who read books for pleasure and the remainder who do not.

The fear among some publishers is that while existing readers are boosting bookshop sales by buying more, it is increasingly difficult to get disenfranchised, non-readers into the book habit.

The oldest age bracket, the over-55s, are also by far the biggest readers, spending an average of 58 minutes a day – six times the national average.

Others argue that despite the pressures of modern living, the appetite for fiction is still huge and unlikely to dwindle.

Kate Mosse, founder of the Orange prize and its honorary director, warned of the dangers of believing that Britons had increasingly little time for literature. She said: "Of course many people find they have less time for reading but that says nothing of the pleasure they get out of it – I don't think people find anything as satisfying as a good book."

That may be so for many women, but men, seemingly, have not grasped the pleasure of reading a good book.

According to the survey, about 70 per cent of books started are opened by women.

Cohabitation also seems to be a disincentive to reading.

In only 23 per cent of relationships do both halves of a couple read fiction – fewer than the 26 per cent of households that own two cars.

There are regional blackspots too. While those in the South of England read the highest number of books, 35 a year, the Midlands is home to the nation's least voracious readers, with an average consumption of 22 books per annum.

The participants in the survey had to answer an in-depth questionnaire on their reading habits before keeping a "reading diary" for three months and then being debriefed.