I disagree that recreational reading has to cost the person money. There's this thing called libraries....
Again, you have to have access to them. In my childhood there were bookmobiles. These were large two-door vans the size of a small bus that not only visited schools, but also points outside of towns. They were small mobile libraries. It was a treat in school when you name came up to help select books for your class. Away from school, you checked out books as you would a library. Just signed your name on the check-out list; no card needed.
I can't remember when bookmobiles went away. It's like they were there and then they weren't. It was sometime in the 1970s. Back then, in school, you weren't restricted to books by reading course. The whole library was open to enjoyment. Outside of the school library, the nearest were in the county seats, which was a once-a-week (if that) trip and varied considerably in the number of books.
There were some periodicals in the libraries. You wouldn't find
Alfred Hitchchock's Mystery Magazine or
Amazing Stories. Those you could pick up at the grocer's or drug store or, later, the convenience stories. Then, during the contraction, they disappeared from there. Had to drive a hour to a bookstore to find such. When that one closed and the nearest bookstores were two hours away, that was a stopping point, or, if I had a friend heading that way, I'd ask them to look for genre periodicals, but those became hard to find even there.
As to assigned reading....bleah. In a lit class, dark and dreary, sums that up. It's reading, and some may like what's assigned, but like an Ernest Hemmingway anthology, it tends to be unrelentingly dark. It's reading, but much of it isn't reading for pleasure. Reading for pleasure, now, that's something different, and that declined long before there were ebooks.
The children tipped us off on just how much. We read to ours and we read and we let them know that there was fun reading out there. But while they had a small circle who read for pleasure, for others that fell away by high school or in the high school years. That was very different than when it was common to see people reading paperbacks.
How do I know they aren't reading ebooks? I don't. I only know it's unlikely because of that gap between the contraction of print distribution and portable devices to read books on. That's a gap close to a generation. That's people who got out of reading for pleasure because they couldn't find what they wanted to read raising children who don't see them reading for pleasure.
What goes on in the cities, I don't know. My hypothesis is that the contraction of print distribution caused a feed-back effect in terms of declining rural sales and readership. That matches what I've observed in a span of about sixty years.
And do your cars explode once per book, like in that series? 
But for my brain, I can't write if I can't write. And when I can write, I make the time. The two biggest things to get myself to write are snowplowing (not with actual snow, the writing exercise!)
That's amazing. We just call them mini roundabouts.
If you end up making an enemies-to-lovers romantic subplot then please 
send 
