Not necessarily. Is Harry Potter for edification? Trashy romance novels?

In any case, the article specifically notes that reading for pleasure, a subset of all reading, has declined.

> One conflated a time-consuming activity with a quick one, and the other conflated time periods of comparison.

There was no conflation by the article.

You presented a selective quotation that omitted the yearly book reading stats and attempted to argue misleadingly that the article was comparing a daily time scale to a yearly time scale.

I think you missed the point of the reading vs. gambling comparison. From the article: "Gambling has become [emphasis mine] a more common leisure activity than reading a book." In other words, the change is the point. Gambling was not always more popular than reading.