12

The most alarmist diagnoses abound concerning young people’s relationship with reading, the intensity of which is matched only by the value attributed to reading books or the press in the construction of citizenship, school meritocracy and society’s democratic good health. The Pratiques culturelles 2018 survey provides elements for describing and analysing the reading relationships of young people aged 15-24 in mainland France, at the intersection of self-definitions as readers, reading practices for books, comics, manga and the press, their media (paper or digital), the linguistic openness of these different types of reading, as well as the resulting tastes and attachments, elements that enable them to be compared with those of their elders. This information reveals six readership ratios of varying numerical importance within the youth population: the most numerous are young people who describe themselves as reticent readers and have a distant relationship with books and no relationship with the press (31%), followed by young people who describe themselves as non-readers and read neither press nor books (21%), then those who describe themselves as average readers and have an eclectic consumption of the press and an interest in books (16%), those who describe themselves as light readers, who read the press but stay away from books (14%), those who describe themselves as non-readers and read only the press (9%), and finally those who describe themselves as big readers, read a lot of books and are interested in the press (also 9%).