When I was younger, I remember how excited almost everyone was for the release of new books. Harry Potter was a popular one, but in elementary school pretty much all of my friends were reading one book or another at any point in time.
Today, I can count on one hand the number of friends I have who actually read books for fun. While reading books was a popular hobby in elementary school, it seems like the majority of people I talk to now say they either don't have time to read, or have lost interest in it.
Part of this I feel might be due to the fact that reading became less fun as more of us entered middle and high school, and reading books became part of the English curriculum. In this way, more teens may stop associating reading books with fun as much as they would with schoolwork. Reading becomes a chore.
Due to the increased use of technology as we get older, our attention spans may have also gotten smaller. I have actually noticed that while I could read for hours on end as a young child, these days if I pick up a book I'm more than likely to get distracted by something on my smart phone, or am simply not able to concentrate in the same way I did when I was younger.
With a smartphone, your attention can be divided multiple ways. In two seconds, you can go from checking a text message to looking up something online to watching a video on Youtube. With a book, on the other hand your mind is stuck to the story. There's nowhere else to go, and no other distractions. For some people, this can actually be a welcome break for their mind. For many, though, it's an inconvenience.
But there comes a certain pleasure in being able to finish an entire book. Reading allows you to take a temporary sabbatical from your own life and become absorbed in a story that can take you anywhere. It can be suspenseful, funny, heart-wrenching, joyful, or all of these things at the same time. It's a hobby that I know I enjoyed greatly as a child and though I still enjoy it today, I could still learn something from my childhood self; how to let yourself live in that moment and simply revel in a great story without the need for anything else.