Books are the invaluable, colossal storage of mankind’s immense scholarship and are still commonly perceived as a more reliable source of knowledge even in this age of digitized information. Extensive reading is often promoted as being vital to cognitive development, especially for students in primary and secondary education. While it could now be considered common knowledge that reading is highly beneficial, reading habits vary among individuals in the same culture and receiving the same public education. This could be due to demographic variations and differences in socioeconomic status, or other factors such as family background and education. Despite the ample literature on reading habits, there still exists a lack of holistic approach with empirical results concerning the reciprocal interactions of reading and its relevant affecting factors. This data article presents a dataset of 1676 responses to the survey “Studying reading habits and preferences” of junior high school students in Vietnam. Result analysis facilitates evaluation of reading habits and their affecting factors, thus holding implications on education measures and policy. The dataset is available with the paper.