Publishing practitioners are both cultural merchants and reading promoters. Understanding their reading practices is crucial, as these directly shape the quality of published works and the efficacy of reading advocacy. However, existing large-scale reading surveys rarely isolate this professional group for targeted analysis, and historical studies on publishers' reading have largely remained at the level of individual biographical narratives. To address this gap, this study investigates the reading cognition, behaviors, and structural disparities among Chinese publishing practitioners from the perspective of "professional readers." A mixed-methods design was adopted, utilizing a 2020 nationwide online questionnaire as the primary instrument, supplemented by semi-structured interviews. Through snowball and judgment sampling targeting self-identified publishing staff, 2,853 valid responses were collected, yielding a sample generally representative of the Chinese publishing workforce. The questionnaire measured five core dimensions—perceived importance, demand, daily reading time, expenditure, and satisfaction—alongside demographic and occupational variables. Follow-up interviews provided qualitative depth for interpreting quantitative patterns. The findings reveal several key insights. First, practitioners exhibit a pronounced "knowing–doing gap": while 90.36% regard reading as important or very important (mean = 4.361/5), over half (52.09%) rate their satisfaction as merely "average," and only 32.63% express satisfaction. This gap stems not from attitudinal negligence but from systemic "time poverty" driven by intensive editorial workloads and performance pressures, which relegate deep reading to off-work hours. Second, their reading content is heavily concentrated in literature (26.80%) and humanities/social sciences (26.07%), demonstrating a distinct "productive reading" orientation serving professional tasks like topic planning and manuscript editing rather than leisure. Third, significant intra-group disparities emerge along cultural capital dimensions: practitioners under 30, with lower educational attainment, and lower-income groups constitute the "reading-disadvantaged" subgroups, with notably lower reading time, expenditure, and satisfaction. This disadvantage persists until nearly age 40, raising concerns about generational succession. Fourth, male practitioners report higher reading demand and satisfaction than females, a disparity attributed to gendered occupational structures—women are overwhelmingly concentrated in time-consuming frontline editorial roles, compounded by domestic responsibilities. Fifth, regional reading patterns broadly mirror local economic development, particularly per-capita GDP. The study concludes that improving practitioners' reading conditions fundamentally requires restructuring the industry's labor and assessment systems rather than adjusting individual attitudes. Institutional reforms are proposed, including revising volume-based performance metrics, embedding professional reading time into work schedules, and drawing on historical precedents like the Commercial Press's in-house reading rooms. Cultivating professional ethics that view reading as integral to editorial competence, and fostering "scholar-editors" through deep reading in publishing education, are also essential. This research provides the first large-scale empirical mapping of Chinese publishing practitioners' reading landscape, offering diagnostic insights and actionable pathways for fortifying the industry's cultural foundation.