I love the positivity and statistical kinking, but eighteen years working at the coal-face of reading decline - a high school English class - has taught me that the decline is perhaps even more severe than we think. Brains have changed. If there is anything left to mine, it’s a new and unrecognisable substance, and I’m not sure what it’s useful for, or even if it would burn.
No doubt people lie about virtuous activities, such as reading. But in order to explain the consistency in self-reported reading time, though, you have to assume that not only reading actually decreased. Also, lying about it increased up by the same amount that reading decreased.
We would have to find a way to explain two things:
1. The increase in lying
2. The coincidence that lying increases match reading decreases so well
Good point, but there are coincidences to be explained if we assume reading is static as well, such as the decrease in NAEP scores in the smartphone era after decades of increases.
Maybe a way to marry these is to assume some kind of stable segment of enthusiastic readers plus a larger segment of people who read little, or not at all, unless forced to in school.
This might have always been the distribution, and the enthusiastic readers today are as fine as they were 30 years ago. But the non-enthusiasts are where the decline is located.
Seems testable, do you happen to know more about the data?
First, when I was in public school in the US back in the 1960's, most of my classmates didn't read. They could read, but they really didn't care for it. Like math, they complained about reading assignments, avoided homework, copied and cheated, all the usual stuff. I was a bookworm, and it made me weird.
Second, you can't separate reading from culture. On the whole, society was not nearly as hopeless in the 1960's as it is now. People in school did see a decent future for all, and a stellar future for those who studied and worked hard, and that included reading. It's now become the Hunger Games. The President of the United States doesn't read. I don't think brains have changed, so much as they've adapted.
"I don’t buy this. Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation."
I really, really want to tell you that this is true and that your are right and that the kids are alright - but it simply isn't so. I think your piece - which was excellent and I enjoyed reading very much - speaks to those born prior to 2007 when Mt. Doom erupted and Steve Jobs rebuilt Barad-Dur and debuted the IPhone. What I see each day in the classroom and the hallways of my high school is far more dire than the picture you present. The screen is ubiquitous. While my high school does have a no phones policy we also are a 1:1 Chromebook school. "Put away the IPhone screens. Those are not educational. Now, open up your Chromebook and complete the assignments on Canvas on a screen." It's lunacy. We adopted ed tech and 1:1 with no forethought and the blind acceptance that this would "meet the kids where they are" and "bring the classroom into the 21st century." We fell into the Jurassic Park Fallacy: “Your teachers were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Young adults do instinctively reach for their phone without realizing it. I see it each day. They joke about screen time and openly admit being up until 1 or 2 AM on their phones or other screens. Screen have been a part of their lives from Baby Einstein videos to the IPad streaming Sesame Street at the restaurant through COVID schooling to today. Not to mention the damage Lucy Caulkins and the Teachers College at Columbia did to their literacy skills. Caulkins and her "Units of Study" program were the educational equivalent of Thomas Midgley Jr. and leaded gasoline. Books are simply not part of their media consumption at all. It's not just that they don't like to read, it's that they don't know how to read. For example, I use full texts in my philosophy class. 6 years ago it was not always easy to get everyone on the same page with the text we were working on, but I could predict the problems areas and more difficult chapters and prepare for them. I could reliably depend on the class being able to focus and attend to a text for a class period. Today? The resilience and focus is gone for the vast majority of my students. I have to break the reading sections down to 5 pages at a time to keep an even pace with what they can comprehend and complete. I see far fewer students reading for pleasure these days as well. In the past I always had a group of a students who I could engage with our shared interest in Tolkien, Douglas Adams, Vonnegut or other books and authors. We'd share recommendations. I still have a library of gently and not so gently used texts that the students can borrow or, if they really liked the book, keep for themselves. It was used frequently. Now? Hardly ever. Our library got rid of sizeable chunk of physical texts a few years ago. Some of them were badly outdated but others were downsized because they weren't checked out. I took a small personal library of texts for my classroom. Students simply weren't checking them out. They aren't reading books - digital or physical. They are skimming words online. They are texting and reading social media posts. Neither of those practices have the same value or build knowledge as reading book does. It's bleak. We may be on the crest of the last wave of literate adults. What I experience each day in the classroom does not give me hope for the future of reading or a literate public. I still hope that reading, to paraphrase Dr. Malcolm again, will find a way.
You make a distinction here that I wish was more at the forefront of this discussion. People act like iPhone screen = bad and Chromebook screen = good. But the most surprising thing I found while researching this piece was that the largest drop in reading time occurred in 2009. That's before all of the things we consider the most addictive–– Instagram, Snapchat, shortform video, even before YouTube as we know it today.
The underrated advantage of printed text, I think, is that it increases the friction for task switching. When I'm reading on my laptop, other tasks are a click away. When I'm reading a book, I have to save my place and grab my phone instead, or even get up and walk somewhere. That tiny extra bit of friction disproportionately decreases the likelihood that I'll switch tasks.
Agreed on the friction aspect. It’s why my Kindle is uncharged and unloved on top of my bookshelf. It was too easy to browse other apps and tools on it. A book is a singular focus. Same with writing. A pen and a journal allows the writer of freedom from distraction. I can’t creative write on a keyboard for long. I’ll scroll Wikipedia for example or find news to anger me. Focus broken. Writing task failed. A journal and a pen is freedom from all that.
Interesting critique of the post. I teach real estate which is overly legal and broad. You are correct that most learners do not know "how" to read. They read to memorize rather than to comprehend. Taking a visual learner and trying to get them to do more than just take a visual snap shot of the material has been the hardest part of teaching. They have been raised to take multiple choice tests instead of writing a story about the material. Happily, the yous and the mes will help them learn to "live" reading.
I am a public school librarian, and anecdotally speaking, I see the average student spending less of their free time reading than they did even five years ago. That doesn’t mean that kids have lost their natural curiosity; it means that a lot of them haven’t yet developed the stamina to be able to handle long-form text.
As an elementary school librarian, I am in a unique position that allows me to expose kids to reading and great books. For the upper elementary kids, I choose a wide variety of complex but interesting long-form non-fiction and fiction chapter books for my collection. I do lots of book talks and read-alouds with the upper elementary grades, and on a positive note, I can tell you that for many children, their natural curiosity and desire to learn is alive and kicking. Many of them respond well to these books, and some of them will even check them out on their own, and some of those kids will bring the books to me and tell me about what they read, if they had any struggles with their reading, etc. It’s immensely gratifying to me to watch them develop their love of reading in this way. And yet, I had never thought that what I’m teaching and encouraging is in more and more ways a counter-cultural practice. It is challenging for print books to compete with the many screens in their lives.
Re: “the data”, we can say that reading scores in the US have stagnated or declined since 2019 in the United. That’s according to NAEP. So two things are true: the printed word can “remain,” while population-level reading ability and reading engagement still decline.
I don’t believe we are heading towards a post-literate society. I think we’re moving towards a post-literate condition. A condition in which literacy is being redefined downward.
The following statement provokes strong reactions from across the spectrum: if kids and teens are generally abandoning text-heavy books in favor of graphic novels and manga, is anything lost? And if so, by whom? And what do we make of the fact that a significant percentage of books being consumed by adults are actually YA novels? The same questions apply.
I have no doubt that books and literacy will survive. I also believe that mass literacy as a shared baseline is eroding. Text is losing its central cultural authority. But at least for the children, I know that their natural curiosity is still there because I see it every day. Even if text doesn’t lose it central cultural authority, I am hoping that as many students as possible will end up not unlike the monks in the Middle Ages in one particular way: they will be literate people who will be able to think deeply and reflect on what they’ve read and learned, even if the rest of the society can only handle cat memes (nothing against cat memes per se; it’s just that they shouldn’t be the final destination for the “culture” are students consume!)
Do you know how those surveys define a book? Do ebooks count? Does novel length fan fiction? For that matter, is an hour a day reading articles different from an hour a day reading a book, from an intellectual point of view?
Different for each survey, but it seems standard now to count ebooks and not audiobooks. I haven't seen any survey that goes into the granularity of reading, say, a scientific paper as a PDF on your laptop vs. reading a novel.
I think your skepticism is warranted. Number of books read as an indicator, of how many words read in a time period, is a metric that is less indicative today than 100 years ago. My kindle (books read) statistics from 2019 through 2025: 35, 46, 115, 129, 160, 104, 75 show a great deal of variation. I am obviously an outlier but I can use this to illustrate the issue.
I was still working during the 1st two years of those statistics. When I retired I had 70,000 emails stored for reference. I read and wrote thousands of emails per year. In a year I read and wrote hundreds of documents, read text material on hundreds of webpages, read and wrote many texts. If that "other" volume of text was converted to "books equivalent", I read maybe double or triple of my actual books count.
The underlying snarky judgement about whether text is meaningful if it isn't a book, you know the whole that is not literature argument; I have always considered that BS, as any written word that was read conveyed some element of information. Think of the billions of words of text that is written and read in text based communication platforms (e.g. direct messages in social media, SMS on phones, substack, closed captions) and convert that into "books equivalent" for each person. A vast majority of people are in the 11 books or more category. All of that text conveyed information, granted some of it was disinformation or misleading but historically lots of book words were discovered to be wrong.
I am old, so take the above with a grain of salt, but I think I read more now than when I was in college. The metric needs to change to words read or "book equivalents" read. I think in general, folks read more now than their predecessors.
I think this is an underrated point: we really don't know how much text people are reading, all in. How many text messages, Slack messages, emails, etc.? How do we count watching a video with subtitles?
To Trevor's comment, all text is not equivalent. 100k words of text messages don't add up to a 100k word book. But that raises another question that we don't have the answer for: what kind of reading, exactly, is going up or down? I don't buy the idea that everyone who used to read Ulysses is now watching TikToks instead. But if you use to read a couple dime store detective novels every year, maybe now you're satisfied watching HBO?
Text volume and value of the content are two different parameters. I would say any text that is read and interpreted is conveying information. The part of your brain that parses text is engaged. The value is relative to the people and circumstance. I have had a text exchange with a controls engineer at a chemical plant while I was at home in bed. The several hundred words we exchanged, engaged the troubleshooting parts of our brains at a very high level. Most people reading that text exchange probably would not understand most of it even though they parsed the text.
Reading Asimov's Foundation series engaged my brain at a much higher level than reading Homer's Odyssey. Someone who studies ancient writing might have the complete opposite experience and value judgement. Trying to figure out the value of text content often devolves into judgement. You know the whole decades long argument that Science Fiction is not literature. Or romance novels are not literature.
A vast majority of my deepest thinking in chemical process control, failure analysis and risk assessment came in the form of text in emails, chat, powerpoint slides, and other written documents. Very few books covered those topics because we were working on current events which would be too specific to cover that way.
Volume and value are separate, yes. But volume itself *has value,* and that shouldn't be discounted.
What I mean is that some ideas can't be communicated in a 500-1000 word email. They're just too complex for that. So if you aren't comfortable working with a book, there are some complex ideas that you just can't access (I'm using "you" to mean someone that can't read long books, not you specifically).
Your text exchange highlights a lot of this. It is short, high value, complex text. But it only makes sense due to a large base of knowledge you've acquired, some of which (I assume) came from longer works you had to wrestle with.
So for me, it's not "Harry Potter is 700 pages, it's more valuable than your emails." It's "reading a long work requires and develops a few different skills than reading a short one." Which means people could be both reading more and still missing things.
Books are email are both reading, but books have much longer thoughts in them. We don’t know exactly which ingredient in books that’s missing from scrolling video is important for building wisdom, but long thoughts seem important.
"I think there is a deep truth here: human desires are complex and multidimensional, and this makes them both hard to quench and hard to hack... If we were easier to please, we wouldn’t have made it this far. We would have gorged ourselves to death as soon as we figured out how to cultivate sugarcane."
The sobering thing for those of us who read too much is that eerily identical arguments were advanced about writing...by Plato himself. (Writing down his dialogues was but the first sin committed against his beliefs. Sad and hilarious.) He relied on the art of memory (see Frances Yates for a great book about this), as did Greek and, later, Roman elites. Giordano Bruno, a medieval practitioner, recited a list of 2000 names flawlessly in front of the Pope...and then did it again backwards. It was said he could learn a new language in four weeks using this method. The only problem was how formidably difficult the method was to learn, and that difficulty increased proportionally to the utility of the method.
As a techie, one thing I've learned is that the stupider, faster, cheaper thing always replaces the great but complicated or inconvenient thing, and this happens faster the more stupid/fast/cheap points the new thing has. But the world has never been nerd-free, and I think that'll continue.
As a children's author, I've visited schools around the world and, in particular, held writing competitions for primary school children. I've also been an annual judge on the finalists panel of the Oxford University Press's annual writing competition for children in Asia and now South America, aged 5 to 12.
In relation to the first, on the upside, I've found that kids LOVE being read to, even if the language is more sophisticated than they are used to: presumably because modern publishing for children is an abyss now of dumbing down (which is why I self-published my books, which kids (especially boys), teachers and librarians loved. The teachers would use my books to find "unusual" words to write on their Smartboards for the kids to learn). On the downside, while book sales were excellent in Asia - and notably in one UK private boarding school where parents had to opt out rather than in - (I could sign up to 300 books after just one day's visit) they were abysmal elsewhere and particularly in Australia, where despite the fact that teachers told me that the kids were left "raving" about my books, their beknighted parents would simply throw the order forms in the bin, preferring to purchase the latest tech-game for their kids. And this at Sydney's and Melbourne's most elite private schools. "Captain Underpants" did not get the same reception...
In relation to the second, whereas ,some years ago, the kids would respond in large numbers if the writing challenge were to write a haiku, or describe their hero, or indeed if it were set for homework (I received 90 entries from Grade 5 - ten year olds- from one international school in Hong Kong - see more below), I have now had to cancel my competition for lack of entries. My last competition attracted precisely two entries, from gifted writers who had won in previous competitions, and I had to "stretch" the numbers imaginatively so that those kids didn't feel that the only reason they'd won was their lack of competition.
In relation the third, it's a somewhat horrifying situation. For the first couple of years, I would judge, say, the 6 to 8 year old writers, mainly from India and some from Hong Kong, who were asked to write a book review about their favourite book. (And think not that entries from India would be poorer for their provenance; in my experience over all the years I ran these competitions, the Indian kiddies were BY FAR the superior writers to all others, including one poor little white girl from one of Sydney's most elite girls schools who repeatedly entered and whose writing was terrible, though her teachers said she was their standout writer). At first, all was "well", except that certain entries I disqualified because large sections of them had been plagiarized. (And remember, these entries had been screened by not only the teacher presenting them, but also several layers of "under judges" who hadn't thought to check for plagiarism - or perhaps didn't care?).
Then, two years ago, the unthinkable happened. One of the final entries in my section (8 to 10 years old) was so well-written, "adult-ly" worded, and sophisticated that I undertook a really close look at it, and searched again, for plagiarism. And lo and behold, it had been written by AI! I checked with my daughter (a 28 year old school teacher at Melbourne's highest achieving state primary school - needless to say 90% of the students are of Chinese origin, 5% other Asian or Middle Eastern countries, and just 5% "white Australians"). She confirmed it had all the hallmarks of AI.
Now in this competition, the two other judges I work with get to do a quick review of the sections others are judging. One of the judges, an Englishman who considers himself a literary icon and who lectures in English at a university, objected strongly when I told him and the OUP overseer that I had disqualified the child's entry. He actually had the temerity to argue that "we should move with the times" and that "AI is now a part of everyone's toolbox" or words to that effect. The OUP overseer and the other judge prevaricated. "Fine" I said, if you let this entry in and give it the first place you think it deserves, then I am resigning from the judging panel and I will do so publicly." Final result? The child was warned, their teacher was warned, and OUP put a "no work created by AI will be accepted" warning on the entry forms. And that was the end of that. I hope.
And Adam, I must tell you that the writing and reading standard in expensive schools is atrocious, right across the English-speaking world. Just two examples:
- I used to visit, every year with a fun poetry workshop, a lovely English-language primary school which put reading first, whose students were almost exclusively Chinese. They had four different libraries. They had booknooks off the corridors where kids were encourage to curl up with books at playtime. And yet, one of the teachers for Grade 4 told me with despair in his eyes, on one of my later visits, that year by year he was seeing a dramatic decline in writing standards. The kids, he said, were all addicted to computer games. Their parents suffered from FOMO on behalf of their little darlings.
- in the competition I referred to above, where 90 kids, all attending an expensive school in Hong Kong, entered, I could dispose of each entry within less than a second by simply reading their first paragraph. 90% of those who entered could not construct a grammatical sentence. Of the remaining 10%, naturally, due to sheer weight of numbers, I found my first and third place winners. I attended the school to present the prizes. The first place winner was what the kids would describe as a "geek", English, with tousled hair and thick glasses. He told me that his favourite reading subject was the Roman Empire. The second place winner was an Indian child from another ESF school.
But the fact that 90 PERCENT of the first place winner's classmates could not construct a proper sentence is cause for massive alarm. These kids were on the whole of English or Australian origin (their school was located in a part of Hong Kong where people live if they want to pretend they're not living in Hong Kong). Their parents, expatriates, were by defintion aspirational high flyers - because no one moves to Hong Kong if they're not). And yet their kids, who by now will be in their teens, could not write a proper sentence.
And that, Adam, is tomorrow's workforce.
And that is my point. You may say that book purchases are thriving, and that people still consider that reading is important, no matter how addicted they are to their phones.
BUT MY QUESTION IS, WHAT OF THE NEXT GENERATION, AND AFTER THAT???
Will today's kids who barely own a book, and regard reading as a tedious chore to be done for homework only, REALLY keep on purchasing books when they reach adulthood? When all their lives, from the time they were born, they were swamped with screens to which their own parents are addicted? I think not.
Will they REALLY still believe in the value of reading books when their teachers today face an uphill battle to get them to read for leisure or to write a grammatical sentence? I think not.
THE FUTURE, MY FRIEND, IS A LOT DARKER THAN ANY OF US CAN IMAGINE.
Thumbs up to this. 👍I recently posted on this topic from my point of view as an English teacher and administrator. A few points of emphasis: Lots of reading of text not in books. Literacy as it relates to video and audio (and even emoticons) is real. The pandemic was pretty bad for school age people.
But the lion's share of the market for books is being driven by women reading romantasy, literature is around 12% of the market. I don't know if the market for literature was greater in the past, but I think looking at just book sales is misleading.
I'm not a specialist, but I *did* take a year-long grad seminar in American book history with a fairly famous expert. Thing is, it's *always* been romantasy about as far back as we can tell. "Canon books" were usually modest sellers at best, even as literacy exploded in the 19th century. They got canonized because a very small cadre of book nerds thought they should...a poorly-dressed version of the "sweater people" above. Nobody sat around waiting for the next installment of What Maisie Knew, that's for damn sure. Melville died in such obscurity that the New York Times called him "Henry" in its (tiny) obituary.
Hey Adam, I love this post. I'm a 7th grade English teacher, so literacy is constantly on my mind. The decline in reading my colleagues and I see is with younger kids, and I'm wondering if you have any data that could make my colleagues more optimistic. Have you seen the data about how student literacy scores are really troubling? Anecdotally, my older co-workers recall times (pre-Pandemic especially) when students seemed to be more willing to give novels a chance. I guess my broader question is: lots of this optimistic data is more adult-focused, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on literacy/reading culture and children. Here's to hoping the data is not as doom-and-gloom there either!
I came here to say this as well. I'm an educator from California, and from what I've learned from tenured teachers with decades of experience, they are extremely concerned with how the literacy rates in the youth (18 and under) are the worst they've ever been. There was actually just a hearing at the government level about this. There was an teacher turned neurologist who testified with alarming statistics and data.
Kids nowadays are officially doing worse in school than their parent's generation, when the trend used to be that each generation achieved more and was more educationally endowed than the generations before them.
When I was in elementary school, we were writing 5 paragraph essays by 3rd grade. Fast forward to today, and many highschool students nationwide struggle to read even one paragraph. I personally witnessed it for a year. They cannot hold a pencil for longer than 2 minutes without getting extremely dysregulated. I agree that literacy among anyone born before 2007 isn't plummeting, but for those born during the GFC, the aftermath of it, and the pandemic... it's an entirely different situation.
We have to be real about this, regardless of how depressing the topic is.
I love the positivity and statistical kinking, but eighteen years working at the coal-face of reading decline - a high school English class - has taught me that the decline is perhaps even more severe than we think. Brains have changed. If there is anything left to mine, it’s a new and unrecognisable substance, and I’m not sure what it’s useful for, or even if it would burn.
This is the rare case where I’ll take anecdata from those on the front lines over surveys. People straight up lie about reading because it’s embarrassing to admit they don’t read. See: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/some-of-you-are-lying-about-reading
No doubt people lie about virtuous activities, such as reading. But in order to explain the consistency in self-reported reading time, though, you have to assume that not only reading actually decreased. Also, lying about it increased up by the same amount that reading decreased.
We would have to find a way to explain two things:
1. The increase in lying
2. The coincidence that lying increases match reading decreases so well
Good point, but there are coincidences to be explained if we assume reading is static as well, such as the decrease in NAEP scores in the smartphone era after decades of increases.
Maybe a way to marry these is to assume some kind of stable segment of enthusiastic readers plus a larger segment of people who read little, or not at all, unless forced to in school.
This might have always been the distribution, and the enthusiastic readers today are as fine as they were 30 years ago. But the non-enthusiasts are where the decline is located.
Seems testable, do you happen to know more about the data?
This seems plausible. Most of the decrease in reading scores since 2013 is located in the bottom half of the distribution: https://briefedbydata.substack.com/p/naep-reading-scores-analysis
90th, 75th, and even 50th percentiles are flat, but 25th is down and 10th even more.
A couple of thoughts.
First, when I was in public school in the US back in the 1960's, most of my classmates didn't read. They could read, but they really didn't care for it. Like math, they complained about reading assignments, avoided homework, copied and cheated, all the usual stuff. I was a bookworm, and it made me weird.
Second, you can't separate reading from culture. On the whole, society was not nearly as hopeless in the 1960's as it is now. People in school did see a decent future for all, and a stellar future for those who studied and worked hard, and that included reading. It's now become the Hunger Games. The President of the United States doesn't read. I don't think brains have changed, so much as they've adapted.
"I don’t buy this. Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation."
I really, really want to tell you that this is true and that your are right and that the kids are alright - but it simply isn't so. I think your piece - which was excellent and I enjoyed reading very much - speaks to those born prior to 2007 when Mt. Doom erupted and Steve Jobs rebuilt Barad-Dur and debuted the IPhone. What I see each day in the classroom and the hallways of my high school is far more dire than the picture you present. The screen is ubiquitous. While my high school does have a no phones policy we also are a 1:1 Chromebook school. "Put away the IPhone screens. Those are not educational. Now, open up your Chromebook and complete the assignments on Canvas on a screen." It's lunacy. We adopted ed tech and 1:1 with no forethought and the blind acceptance that this would "meet the kids where they are" and "bring the classroom into the 21st century." We fell into the Jurassic Park Fallacy: “Your teachers were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Young adults do instinctively reach for their phone without realizing it. I see it each day. They joke about screen time and openly admit being up until 1 or 2 AM on their phones or other screens. Screen have been a part of their lives from Baby Einstein videos to the IPad streaming Sesame Street at the restaurant through COVID schooling to today. Not to mention the damage Lucy Caulkins and the Teachers College at Columbia did to their literacy skills. Caulkins and her "Units of Study" program were the educational equivalent of Thomas Midgley Jr. and leaded gasoline. Books are simply not part of their media consumption at all. It's not just that they don't like to read, it's that they don't know how to read. For example, I use full texts in my philosophy class. 6 years ago it was not always easy to get everyone on the same page with the text we were working on, but I could predict the problems areas and more difficult chapters and prepare for them. I could reliably depend on the class being able to focus and attend to a text for a class period. Today? The resilience and focus is gone for the vast majority of my students. I have to break the reading sections down to 5 pages at a time to keep an even pace with what they can comprehend and complete. I see far fewer students reading for pleasure these days as well. In the past I always had a group of a students who I could engage with our shared interest in Tolkien, Douglas Adams, Vonnegut or other books and authors. We'd share recommendations. I still have a library of gently and not so gently used texts that the students can borrow or, if they really liked the book, keep for themselves. It was used frequently. Now? Hardly ever. Our library got rid of sizeable chunk of physical texts a few years ago. Some of them were badly outdated but others were downsized because they weren't checked out. I took a small personal library of texts for my classroom. Students simply weren't checking them out. They aren't reading books - digital or physical. They are skimming words online. They are texting and reading social media posts. Neither of those practices have the same value or build knowledge as reading book does. It's bleak. We may be on the crest of the last wave of literate adults. What I experience each day in the classroom does not give me hope for the future of reading or a literate public. I still hope that reading, to paraphrase Dr. Malcolm again, will find a way.
You make a distinction here that I wish was more at the forefront of this discussion. People act like iPhone screen = bad and Chromebook screen = good. But the most surprising thing I found while researching this piece was that the largest drop in reading time occurred in 2009. That's before all of the things we consider the most addictive–– Instagram, Snapchat, shortform video, even before YouTube as we know it today.
The underrated advantage of printed text, I think, is that it increases the friction for task switching. When I'm reading on my laptop, other tasks are a click away. When I'm reading a book, I have to save my place and grab my phone instead, or even get up and walk somewhere. That tiny extra bit of friction disproportionately decreases the likelihood that I'll switch tasks.
Agreed on the friction aspect. It’s why my Kindle is uncharged and unloved on top of my bookshelf. It was too easy to browse other apps and tools on it. A book is a singular focus. Same with writing. A pen and a journal allows the writer of freedom from distraction. I can’t creative write on a keyboard for long. I’ll scroll Wikipedia for example or find news to anger me. Focus broken. Writing task failed. A journal and a pen is freedom from all that.
Or a typewriter.
Interesting critique of the post. I teach real estate which is overly legal and broad. You are correct that most learners do not know "how" to read. They read to memorize rather than to comprehend. Taking a visual learner and trying to get them to do more than just take a visual snap shot of the material has been the hardest part of teaching. They have been raised to take multiple choice tests instead of writing a story about the material. Happily, the yous and the mes will help them learn to "live" reading.
I am a public school librarian, and anecdotally speaking, I see the average student spending less of their free time reading than they did even five years ago. That doesn’t mean that kids have lost their natural curiosity; it means that a lot of them haven’t yet developed the stamina to be able to handle long-form text.
As an elementary school librarian, I am in a unique position that allows me to expose kids to reading and great books. For the upper elementary kids, I choose a wide variety of complex but interesting long-form non-fiction and fiction chapter books for my collection. I do lots of book talks and read-alouds with the upper elementary grades, and on a positive note, I can tell you that for many children, their natural curiosity and desire to learn is alive and kicking. Many of them respond well to these books, and some of them will even check them out on their own, and some of those kids will bring the books to me and tell me about what they read, if they had any struggles with their reading, etc. It’s immensely gratifying to me to watch them develop their love of reading in this way. And yet, I had never thought that what I’m teaching and encouraging is in more and more ways a counter-cultural practice. It is challenging for print books to compete with the many screens in their lives.
Re: “the data”, we can say that reading scores in the US have stagnated or declined since 2019 in the United. That’s according to NAEP. So two things are true: the printed word can “remain,” while population-level reading ability and reading engagement still decline.
I don’t believe we are heading towards a post-literate society. I think we’re moving towards a post-literate condition. A condition in which literacy is being redefined downward.
The following statement provokes strong reactions from across the spectrum: if kids and teens are generally abandoning text-heavy books in favor of graphic novels and manga, is anything lost? And if so, by whom? And what do we make of the fact that a significant percentage of books being consumed by adults are actually YA novels? The same questions apply.
I have no doubt that books and literacy will survive. I also believe that mass literacy as a shared baseline is eroding. Text is losing its central cultural authority. But at least for the children, I know that their natural curiosity is still there because I see it every day. Even if text doesn’t lose it central cultural authority, I am hoping that as many students as possible will end up not unlike the monks in the Middle Ages in one particular way: they will be literate people who will be able to think deeply and reflect on what they’ve read and learned, even if the rest of the society can only handle cat memes (nothing against cat memes per se; it’s just that they shouldn’t be the final destination for the “culture” are students consume!)
Do you know how those surveys define a book? Do ebooks count? Does novel length fan fiction? For that matter, is an hour a day reading articles different from an hour a day reading a book, from an intellectual point of view?
Different for each survey, but it seems standard now to count ebooks and not audiobooks. I haven't seen any survey that goes into the granularity of reading, say, a scientific paper as a PDF on your laptop vs. reading a novel.
I think your skepticism is warranted. Number of books read as an indicator, of how many words read in a time period, is a metric that is less indicative today than 100 years ago. My kindle (books read) statistics from 2019 through 2025: 35, 46, 115, 129, 160, 104, 75 show a great deal of variation. I am obviously an outlier but I can use this to illustrate the issue.
I was still working during the 1st two years of those statistics. When I retired I had 70,000 emails stored for reference. I read and wrote thousands of emails per year. In a year I read and wrote hundreds of documents, read text material on hundreds of webpages, read and wrote many texts. If that "other" volume of text was converted to "books equivalent", I read maybe double or triple of my actual books count.
The underlying snarky judgement about whether text is meaningful if it isn't a book, you know the whole that is not literature argument; I have always considered that BS, as any written word that was read conveyed some element of information. Think of the billions of words of text that is written and read in text based communication platforms (e.g. direct messages in social media, SMS on phones, substack, closed captions) and convert that into "books equivalent" for each person. A vast majority of people are in the 11 books or more category. All of that text conveyed information, granted some of it was disinformation or misleading but historically lots of book words were discovered to be wrong.
I am old, so take the above with a grain of salt, but I think I read more now than when I was in college. The metric needs to change to words read or "book equivalents" read. I think in general, folks read more now than their predecessors.
I think this is an underrated point: we really don't know how much text people are reading, all in. How many text messages, Slack messages, emails, etc.? How do we count watching a video with subtitles?
To Trevor's comment, all text is not equivalent. 100k words of text messages don't add up to a 100k word book. But that raises another question that we don't have the answer for: what kind of reading, exactly, is going up or down? I don't buy the idea that everyone who used to read Ulysses is now watching TikToks instead. But if you use to read a couple dime store detective novels every year, maybe now you're satisfied watching HBO?
Text volume and value of the content are two different parameters. I would say any text that is read and interpreted is conveying information. The part of your brain that parses text is engaged. The value is relative to the people and circumstance. I have had a text exchange with a controls engineer at a chemical plant while I was at home in bed. The several hundred words we exchanged, engaged the troubleshooting parts of our brains at a very high level. Most people reading that text exchange probably would not understand most of it even though they parsed the text.
Reading Asimov's Foundation series engaged my brain at a much higher level than reading Homer's Odyssey. Someone who studies ancient writing might have the complete opposite experience and value judgement. Trying to figure out the value of text content often devolves into judgement. You know the whole decades long argument that Science Fiction is not literature. Or romance novels are not literature.
A vast majority of my deepest thinking in chemical process control, failure analysis and risk assessment came in the form of text in emails, chat, powerpoint slides, and other written documents. Very few books covered those topics because we were working on current events which would be too specific to cover that way.
Volume and value are separate, yes. But volume itself *has value,* and that shouldn't be discounted.
What I mean is that some ideas can't be communicated in a 500-1000 word email. They're just too complex for that. So if you aren't comfortable working with a book, there are some complex ideas that you just can't access (I'm using "you" to mean someone that can't read long books, not you specifically).
Your text exchange highlights a lot of this. It is short, high value, complex text. But it only makes sense due to a large base of knowledge you've acquired, some of which (I assume) came from longer works you had to wrestle with.
So for me, it's not "Harry Potter is 700 pages, it's more valuable than your emails." It's "reading a long work requires and develops a few different skills than reading a short one." Which means people could be both reading more and still missing things.
Books are email are both reading, but books have much longer thoughts in them. We don’t know exactly which ingredient in books that’s missing from scrolling video is important for building wisdom, but long thoughts seem important.
Books and their content may have a higher relative value in your frame of reference. Not completely so in mine. See my reply to Adam.
i was about to delete substack bc i felt it to be so pseudo-intellectual but this great article made me want to stay.
+1000
"I think there is a deep truth here: human desires are complex and multidimensional, and this makes them both hard to quench and hard to hack... If we were easier to please, we wouldn’t have made it this far. We would have gorged ourselves to death as soon as we figured out how to cultivate sugarcane."
The sobering thing for those of us who read too much is that eerily identical arguments were advanced about writing...by Plato himself. (Writing down his dialogues was but the first sin committed against his beliefs. Sad and hilarious.) He relied on the art of memory (see Frances Yates for a great book about this), as did Greek and, later, Roman elites. Giordano Bruno, a medieval practitioner, recited a list of 2000 names flawlessly in front of the Pope...and then did it again backwards. It was said he could learn a new language in four weeks using this method. The only problem was how formidably difficult the method was to learn, and that difficulty increased proportionally to the utility of the method.
As a techie, one thing I've learned is that the stupider, faster, cheaper thing always replaces the great but complicated or inconvenient thing, and this happens faster the more stupid/fast/cheap points the new thing has. But the world has never been nerd-free, and I think that'll continue.
I'm afraid I agree with Jamie Currie below.
As a children's author, I've visited schools around the world and, in particular, held writing competitions for primary school children. I've also been an annual judge on the finalists panel of the Oxford University Press's annual writing competition for children in Asia and now South America, aged 5 to 12.
In relation to the first, on the upside, I've found that kids LOVE being read to, even if the language is more sophisticated than they are used to: presumably because modern publishing for children is an abyss now of dumbing down (which is why I self-published my books, which kids (especially boys), teachers and librarians loved. The teachers would use my books to find "unusual" words to write on their Smartboards for the kids to learn). On the downside, while book sales were excellent in Asia - and notably in one UK private boarding school where parents had to opt out rather than in - (I could sign up to 300 books after just one day's visit) they were abysmal elsewhere and particularly in Australia, where despite the fact that teachers told me that the kids were left "raving" about my books, their beknighted parents would simply throw the order forms in the bin, preferring to purchase the latest tech-game for their kids. And this at Sydney's and Melbourne's most elite private schools. "Captain Underpants" did not get the same reception...
In relation to the second, whereas ,some years ago, the kids would respond in large numbers if the writing challenge were to write a haiku, or describe their hero, or indeed if it were set for homework (I received 90 entries from Grade 5 - ten year olds- from one international school in Hong Kong - see more below), I have now had to cancel my competition for lack of entries. My last competition attracted precisely two entries, from gifted writers who had won in previous competitions, and I had to "stretch" the numbers imaginatively so that those kids didn't feel that the only reason they'd won was their lack of competition.
In relation the third, it's a somewhat horrifying situation. For the first couple of years, I would judge, say, the 6 to 8 year old writers, mainly from India and some from Hong Kong, who were asked to write a book review about their favourite book. (And think not that entries from India would be poorer for their provenance; in my experience over all the years I ran these competitions, the Indian kiddies were BY FAR the superior writers to all others, including one poor little white girl from one of Sydney's most elite girls schools who repeatedly entered and whose writing was terrible, though her teachers said she was their standout writer). At first, all was "well", except that certain entries I disqualified because large sections of them had been plagiarized. (And remember, these entries had been screened by not only the teacher presenting them, but also several layers of "under judges" who hadn't thought to check for plagiarism - or perhaps didn't care?).
Then, two years ago, the unthinkable happened. One of the final entries in my section (8 to 10 years old) was so well-written, "adult-ly" worded, and sophisticated that I undertook a really close look at it, and searched again, for plagiarism. And lo and behold, it had been written by AI! I checked with my daughter (a 28 year old school teacher at Melbourne's highest achieving state primary school - needless to say 90% of the students are of Chinese origin, 5% other Asian or Middle Eastern countries, and just 5% "white Australians"). She confirmed it had all the hallmarks of AI.
Now in this competition, the two other judges I work with get to do a quick review of the sections others are judging. One of the judges, an Englishman who considers himself a literary icon and who lectures in English at a university, objected strongly when I told him and the OUP overseer that I had disqualified the child's entry. He actually had the temerity to argue that "we should move with the times" and that "AI is now a part of everyone's toolbox" or words to that effect. The OUP overseer and the other judge prevaricated. "Fine" I said, if you let this entry in and give it the first place you think it deserves, then I am resigning from the judging panel and I will do so publicly." Final result? The child was warned, their teacher was warned, and OUP put a "no work created by AI will be accepted" warning on the entry forms. And that was the end of that. I hope.
And Adam, I must tell you that the writing and reading standard in expensive schools is atrocious, right across the English-speaking world. Just two examples:
- I used to visit, every year with a fun poetry workshop, a lovely English-language primary school which put reading first, whose students were almost exclusively Chinese. They had four different libraries. They had booknooks off the corridors where kids were encourage to curl up with books at playtime. And yet, one of the teachers for Grade 4 told me with despair in his eyes, on one of my later visits, that year by year he was seeing a dramatic decline in writing standards. The kids, he said, were all addicted to computer games. Their parents suffered from FOMO on behalf of their little darlings.
- in the competition I referred to above, where 90 kids, all attending an expensive school in Hong Kong, entered, I could dispose of each entry within less than a second by simply reading their first paragraph. 90% of those who entered could not construct a grammatical sentence. Of the remaining 10%, naturally, due to sheer weight of numbers, I found my first and third place winners. I attended the school to present the prizes. The first place winner was what the kids would describe as a "geek", English, with tousled hair and thick glasses. He told me that his favourite reading subject was the Roman Empire. The second place winner was an Indian child from another ESF school.
But the fact that 90 PERCENT of the first place winner's classmates could not construct a proper sentence is cause for massive alarm. These kids were on the whole of English or Australian origin (their school was located in a part of Hong Kong where people live if they want to pretend they're not living in Hong Kong). Their parents, expatriates, were by defintion aspirational high flyers - because no one moves to Hong Kong if they're not). And yet their kids, who by now will be in their teens, could not write a proper sentence.
And that, Adam, is tomorrow's workforce.
And that is my point. You may say that book purchases are thriving, and that people still consider that reading is important, no matter how addicted they are to their phones.
BUT MY QUESTION IS, WHAT OF THE NEXT GENERATION, AND AFTER THAT???
Will today's kids who barely own a book, and regard reading as a tedious chore to be done for homework only, REALLY keep on purchasing books when they reach adulthood? When all their lives, from the time they were born, they were swamped with screens to which their own parents are addicted? I think not.
Will they REALLY still believe in the value of reading books when their teachers today face an uphill battle to get them to read for leisure or to write a grammatical sentence? I think not.
THE FUTURE, MY FRIEND, IS A LOT DARKER THAN ANY OF US CAN IMAGINE.
Thumbs up to this. 👍I recently posted on this topic from my point of view as an English teacher and administrator. A few points of emphasis: Lots of reading of text not in books. Literacy as it relates to video and audio (and even emoticons) is real. The pandemic was pretty bad for school age people.
But the lion's share of the market for books is being driven by women reading romantasy, literature is around 12% of the market. I don't know if the market for literature was greater in the past, but I think looking at just book sales is misleading.
I'm not a specialist, but I *did* take a year-long grad seminar in American book history with a fairly famous expert. Thing is, it's *always* been romantasy about as far back as we can tell. "Canon books" were usually modest sellers at best, even as literacy exploded in the 19th century. They got canonized because a very small cadre of book nerds thought they should...a poorly-dressed version of the "sweater people" above. Nobody sat around waiting for the next installment of What Maisie Knew, that's for damn sure. Melville died in such obscurity that the New York Times called him "Henry" in its (tiny) obituary.
Congratulations on four years with Substack. Love this story about reading and your guided tour through the literature and opinions, pro and con.
Hey Adam, I love this post. I'm a 7th grade English teacher, so literacy is constantly on my mind. The decline in reading my colleagues and I see is with younger kids, and I'm wondering if you have any data that could make my colleagues more optimistic. Have you seen the data about how student literacy scores are really troubling? Anecdotally, my older co-workers recall times (pre-Pandemic especially) when students seemed to be more willing to give novels a chance. I guess my broader question is: lots of this optimistic data is more adult-focused, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on literacy/reading culture and children. Here's to hoping the data is not as doom-and-gloom there either!
I came here to say this as well. I'm an educator from California, and from what I've learned from tenured teachers with decades of experience, they are extremely concerned with how the literacy rates in the youth (18 and under) are the worst they've ever been. There was actually just a hearing at the government level about this. There was an teacher turned neurologist who testified with alarming statistics and data.
Kids nowadays are officially doing worse in school than their parent's generation, when the trend used to be that each generation achieved more and was more educationally endowed than the generations before them.
When I was in elementary school, we were writing 5 paragraph essays by 3rd grade. Fast forward to today, and many highschool students nationwide struggle to read even one paragraph. I personally witnessed it for a year. They cannot hold a pencil for longer than 2 minutes without getting extremely dysregulated. I agree that literacy among anyone born before 2007 isn't plummeting, but for those born during the GFC, the aftermath of it, and the pandemic... it's an entirely different situation.
We have to be real about this, regardless of how depressing the topic is.
I'm laughing and cringing while I think about my LLM thesis. Thank you for the words of wisdom!
I love your essays. Good luck with the book. Can’t wait to read it!
Love your essays - good research and excellent commentary.