Are we forgetting how to read? The decline in literacy is big news. The Atlantic sounded the alarm in November of 2024, with Rose Horowitch lamenting “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” A host of other publications weighed in. This summer, a follow-up piece by Horowitch summed up the state of the case: “The End of Reading Is Here.”
That sounds over the top, but there is real reason for concern. Reading for pleasure is “in free fall” according to researchers who reviewed the reading habits of hundreds of millions of Americans. From 2003 to 2023, reading for enjoyment declined more than 40 percent.
And it’s not just a matter of how we spend our leisure hours. College professors are drastically curtailing reading assignments to suit their students’ diminished capacities for reading books. At an American Enterprise Institute panel discussion on “Literature Lost,” Brown English professor Amanda Anderson talked about establishing “labs” to remediate her students’ reading deficits.
What is causing the retreat from reading?
Educational “reforms” over recent decades have banished books from the classroom in favor of short excerpts. Test scores are falling.
But the case against social media is even stronger. As novelist George Packer points out, “You can flit back and forth between a nonfiction book and social media (though you’ll lose a lot), but the willing suspension of disbelief does not survive frequent interruption. Works of the imagination need unbroken attention. Mine has gotten worse; don’t tell me yours hasn’t.”
Back in 2004 people were able to pay attention to what they were watching on a screen for an average of two and a half minutes. In the next eight years their attention span eroded to 75 seconds, and by 2021 to 47 seconds.
But is this really such a problem? Maybe we’re not reading less, we’re just reading differently. While most people read fewer books, “Americans are probably reading more words than ever before”— more “emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions.” The Atlantic laments this trend, but others are celebrating it: Reading “isn’t dying. It’s changing. . . . long-standing, influential studies aren’t designed to capture how Gen Z often reads—bouncing between print, e-book and audiobook for the same book—and on web platforms such as Wattpad, Webtoon, Kindle Unlimited, DC Universe Infinite and Marvel Comics online.”
But abandoning novels and long-form nonfiction for doomscrolling is depressing us. Reading yourself to sleep with a Jane Austen novel or A Gentleman in Moscow is soothing to the soul. Taking your iPhone to bed and noticing at 1:30 a.m. that you’ve been on Twitter for two hours—not so much.
And more than our mood is being undermined by the switch from reading books to reading tweets. “American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, reason effectively, and analyze patterns declined from 2006 to 2018.” For the first time in history, average IQs have stopped rising over time—“the Flynn Effect”—and started going down. Long-form reading cultivates “empathy,” “critical thinking,” and “self-reflection.”
A less literate public may be more susceptible to demagoguery. You don’t have to blame post-literate culture for the rise of Donald Trump, as George Will does, to accept his basic point. Will quotes from The New Dark Ages by James Marriott, who warns of “a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal and autocratic.”
What if our liberal institutions depend on a reading public? Horowitch quotes Marshall McCluhan: “The liberal world by definition is literate.” Packer suggests that rising tide of illiteracy may bring on the end of democracy. Totalitarian dystopias tend toward censorship, even toward the abolition of books. Think of Fahrenheit 451.
British social critic Mary Harrington offers the most interesting forecast. She predicts neither totalitarianism nor demagoguery, but . . . monarchy. Harrington argues that the atrophy of long-form reading is unraveling the political and societal changes ushered in by the invention of the printing press: democracy and the nation-state. Our future could look a lot like our medieval past.
There is evidence to support Harrington’s idea that “deep literacy” could “end up as a minority practice roughly in line with pre-print Western cultural norms.” Books may have a future. But possibly only with a few people.
Recently I spoke with Sarah Lacy, the owner of two California bookshops. Lacy pushed back against the decline-of-reading narrative, which, she said, “drives me crazy” because “we just see evidence to the contrary every day.” Particularly in her store in San Francisco, whose clientele includes large numbers of young people who love printed books. And no, “It’s not like vinyl.” Books aren’t “niche.” Playing an LP on a turntable is a pain. But as a friend in tech once told her, a printed book is technology in its peak form: convenient to access, easy to carry, simple to share. Lacy drew my attention to the current bookselling revival—more Barnes & Noble stores, more independent booksellers, and higher sales across the board—and pointed out that, with more books being published and sold, if there are fewer readers, then folks who do read must be upping the number of books they read.
“Of making many books there is no end.” But the market for them appears to be shrinking. There are fewer deep readers, but they read more books. “Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year.” A gap has opened up between the truly literate minority and the vast post-literate majority. We’re trending toward Harrington’s medieval future.
In a digital era when all the cool kids want to be internet influencers, “being a person of letters confers less status than it once did.” But then, St. Benedict and his monks weren’t the cool kids either. They preserved books through the Dark Ages. And eventually there was a Renaissance. Maybe there’s another one in our future.
Elizabeth Kantor lectures on literature and edits books. She is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American Literature.