Long read. But this has been known for over 20 years.

> Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.

"Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century"

https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/fa...