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.
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.
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?
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 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."
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.
Proud author, poet (my debut collection of mystic poetry comes out this month!), book editor & ghostwriter (yes, people throw $ at me to write and subtly rearrange squiggles of text that ultimately end up printed on tree slices), former journalist and English teacher— but most importantly, proud mama of two twentysome things who are avid readers! 📚 ❣️
Love this post, Adam. Just what I needed before I start teaching tomorrow in this numbskull moment. Thanks, John
PS: Oh, and to buck the trend, I'm reading more big hard books than ever. I am almost, finally, done with Swann's Way, which, to be honest, is more than enough Proust for me.
I've been re-reading Rene Clair's Cinema Yesterday and Today. (It's a great read, essentially a discussion among one of the cinema's pioneers, published in the 1920s, with comments on these from him in the 1950s, and again, reviewing both his previous comments in the 1970s. The format is handled gracefully.) In his earliest, most avant-garde incarnation, Clair argues forcefully for cinema as a visual format. And although his views shifted over the years, he still believed that the visual cinematic element was the primary one, even in speech-heavy films. Much could be argued, but I don't see film (pun intended) as essentially a text, accompanied by pictures.
And though I love books, aren't ebooks a useful service for those who prefer reading their Tolstoy whenever, instead of lugging around War and Peace to and from the office? With my eyes finally acknowledging the passage of time, ebooks also provide a service printed books unfortunately can't: flexibly sized formatting.
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. Just my own anecdotal observation, of course.
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 can be 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. Where we go from here, we will see!
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.
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.
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?
i was about to delete substack bc i felt it to be so pseudo-intellectual but this great article made me want to stay.
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.
+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."
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.
Proud author, poet (my debut collection of mystic poetry comes out this month!), book editor & ghostwriter (yes, people throw $ at me to write and subtly rearrange squiggles of text that ultimately end up printed on tree slices), former journalist and English teacher— but most importantly, proud mama of two twentysome things who are avid readers! 📚 ❣️
Love this post, Adam. Just what I needed before I start teaching tomorrow in this numbskull moment. Thanks, John
PS: Oh, and to buck the trend, I'm reading more big hard books than ever. I am almost, finally, done with Swann's Way, which, to be honest, is more than enough Proust for me.
I've been re-reading Rene Clair's Cinema Yesterday and Today. (It's a great read, essentially a discussion among one of the cinema's pioneers, published in the 1920s, with comments on these from him in the 1950s, and again, reviewing both his previous comments in the 1970s. The format is handled gracefully.) In his earliest, most avant-garde incarnation, Clair argues forcefully for cinema as a visual format. And although his views shifted over the years, he still believed that the visual cinematic element was the primary one, even in speech-heavy films. Much could be argued, but I don't see film (pun intended) as essentially a text, accompanied by pictures.
And though I love books, aren't ebooks a useful service for those who prefer reading their Tolstoy whenever, instead of lugging around War and Peace to and from the office? With my eyes finally acknowledging the passage of time, ebooks also provide a service printed books unfortunately can't: flexibly sized formatting.
Congratulations on four years with Substack. Love this story about reading and your guided tour through the literature and opinions, pro and con.
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. Just my own anecdotal observation, of course.
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 can be 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. Where we go from here, we will see!
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.
if books of the Bible counts as books I read at least 66 books in 2025 :)