Serbian and Croatian Gen Z is reading more than older generations

In a world dominated by social media feeds and fleeting attention spans, we might assume that the younger generations would be less inclined to pick up a book in their spare time. However, recent trends in Croatia and Serbia are defying expectations, revealing an interesting shift in reading habits across generations.

It might come as a surprise that Gen Z is bucking the trend when it comes to time spent with reading. Contrary to that one might expect Gen Z spends their time with TikTok and generally on their phone, they are in fact turning more pages than their Millennial predecessors and even outpacing the bookish tendencies of Generation X.

Martin Koprek, Media Director of Ascanius Media Croatia told about the presumption that in the time of social media and short-span formats the younger generation would spend more time online, but in the contrary: A higher share of Gen Z reads books in their spare time compared to the older generations. Today, Gen Z reads more than Millennials and they read more than Generation X.

An initial explanation for this could have simply been the age of Gen Z: their members mainly haven't started full time jobs, and they don't have children yet so more of them have enough spare time to read books.

However, looking at data from 2008 Croatia and 2012 Serbia to see % of Millennials reading books when they had same age as Gen Z are today proved this theory wrong: Gen Z today reads more that Millennials did when they were that age back in 2008.

And maybe even more surprisingly, this is true for for all generations that came before: Gen Z is spending more time with reading than any of its predecessors - contrary to what media consumption one might expect from this generation.

Source: BrandPlus Croatia wave II 2008 & 2023; Do you read books in your free time, at least monthly?

Source: TGI Serbia 2012 & 2023; Do you read books in your free time, at least monthly?