By Kavita Mistry 
According to most sources, the current figure for how many Americans are in a book club is five million. However, this figure hasn’t been updated in over 25 years, so a new estimate is long overdue. Before we share our new estimate, let’s go over where the old estimate came from, and why you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Where does the old estimate of five million book clubbers come from?
The oldest reference we could find to five million book club participants in the US comes from a 1999 New York Times article about Oprah’s book club, the relevant section:
According to Rachel Jacobsohn, who runs a national information-exchange service for book-club members, there are around 500,000 book clubs in America today, twice as many as in 1994. They have between five million and 10 million members. She attributes the growth to Winfrey.
That’s quite an old source! However the claim of 5 million book clubbers has continued to persist without significant update over the last 25 years, with a most recent article making this claim in June 2024.
More concerningly, this article cites a separate article (now not even available online) that cites BookBrowse as the source for the five million book club members in the US… only we never made that claim.
As of writing, if you google ‘five million book club US’ you’ll find plenty of posts and articles making this claim, without citing a source. Concerning, to say the least.
How many people participate in a book club in the US?
BookBrowse estimates there are thirteen million book club members in the US, 5% of the adult population.
We acknowledge this number is also an estimate, although we’re happy to share our source:
In 2022, The Census Bureau administered the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which among other findings, found that “At roughly 5 percent… the share of adults who participated in book clubs or reading groups did not change significantly from five years earlier.”
Meanwhile the 2020 Census found the adult population to be 258 million. So factoring in some population growth, a 5% estimate of the adult population gets us to 13 million!
Is Book Club Participation Increasing or Decreasing?
Based on BookBrowse’s research, book club participation is continuing to increase.
While 13 million is 2.6x larger than the prior estimate of 5 million book club participants, this 5 million estimate hasn’t been updated since 1999, and a lot can happen in 25 years. So in our 2025 book club survey of roughly 1000 respondents, we asked book clubbers whether or not they thought book club participation was increasing, as well as what was actually happening within their own groups:
| Book Club Participation: Perception vs. Actual for Book Club Participants | |||
| Survey Question | Increasing | Decreasing | No Change |
| Perception of Participation Change | 57.28% | 12.22% | 30.50% |
| Actual Group Participation Change | 40.64% | 6.54% | 52.82% |
So good news! While our data is a smaller sample, it looks as though book club participation is increasing, which aligns with other reporting.
Conclusion
BookBrowse is proud to continue our 20+ years of book club research by presenting this new estimate of 13 million book club members in the US. We believe as book clubs continue to grow and change, so will participation. In 1999, online book clubs would be hard to imagine (let alone ordering a book online), and today they’re ubiquitous. We look forward to seeing how book club participation continues to grow and change over the next 20 years!