According to new a polling by YouGov 40% of Britons have not read or listened to a book in the past year.

The median British adult has read or listened to three books in the past year, the survey found.

Women seem to be bigger readers than men, with 66% of women reading at least one book in the last year, compared with 53% of men.

There was a political split: while 72% of remain voters said they’d picked up a book in the past 12 months, 54% of leave voters reported doing so. Labour voters were most likely to have read in the last year (70%) when compared with Lib Dem (64%), Conservative (63%) and Reform (51%) voters.

A class divide also emerged, with 66% of respondents in middle-class households reporting having recently read a book compared with 52% of those in working-class households.

Older Britons are more likely to be readers, according to the survey, with 65% of those aged 65 and over saying they’ve read a book in the last year, compared with 53% of those aged 18 to 24.

The survey asked 2,121 British adults about their reading habits over the previous 12 months at the end of January.

22% of Britons said they read or listened to between one and five books over that period, while 4% reported reading more than 50 books.

The survey also found that most Britons (53%) don’t consider listening to an audiobook to be equivalent to having read that same book. Just 29% said that they think of listening to audiobooks to be the same as reading, while 18% responded “Don’t know”.

When it came to physical books, more than half reported preferring paperbacks (52%) to hardbacks (22%). Physical books remain the go-to for readers, with 61% of those who read a book in the last year saying they mainly read printed texts. However, many now favour ebooks (24%) or audiobooks (14%).

The most popular times to read are at bedtime, in free moments during the day and while on holiday.

Half of Britons have bought a new book over the past year, with 40% buying secondhand, 28% borrowing from family and friends, and 19% taking out books from the library.

The survey found that more than eight in 10 (83%) own at least one physical book, while a quarter (24%) say they own more than 100. Nearly half (45%) of those who do own physical books say they don’t organise them, while others organise by size (19%), genre (17%), alphabetically by author (11%), whether they have been read yet (10%), colour (4%) and alphabetically by title (2%).

Respondents tended to favour fiction, with 55% of those who at least occasionally read leaning that way, compared with 19% for nonfiction. 23% said they pick up an even mix of fiction and nonfiction books. While 63% of female readers said they read mostly or entirely fiction, just 46% of male readers said the same.