Are We in the Twilight of the Age of the Book?

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Some months ago, while on public transit, I pulled out a thick book to read and had barely dug into it when a woman sitting near me turned and stared at me incredulously. 

“Wow,” she interrupted, “are you actually reading that?” 

I considered telling her that the several-hundred-page Penguin Classic was nothing more than a weapon of self-defense, before simply responding in the affirmative.

“Good on you,” she said. “I couldn’t concentrate enough on a book to be able to finish it.”

I told her that I couldn’t imagine no longer having the ability or desire to read.

“Oh no,” she replied. “It’s not that I’ve stopped reading. I just read a lot of shorter things now.”

I expected her next to ask me about the book I was holding. But after a few more unrelated quips, she whipped out her smartphone and lost herself in the usual endless scrolling.  

The encounter underscored a topic that had come up often, both in conversations and in the media, in previous months: the apparent societal-wide decline of book reading in the general population. As smartphones and various forms of digital content have consolidated their hold on our attention, and as AI applications offer shortcuts to deep reading for research, many of us appear to be losing our desire, need and/or capacity to consume longer literary works. 

A few educators I know have confided in me that they’re seeing an increased inability in their students to focus on and finish reading books assigned to them. Some of my adult acquaintances and friends have admitted to suffering from the same handicap. When you gaze around while riding on public buses and trains, you seldom see anyone reading physical books or even e-readers anymore. People instead while away their time scrolling, watching videos, and playing video games (reading a physical book in public feels unusual and out of place). And as someone who’s also written books, I’ve had more than a few conversations with people in the publishing industry—including with other authors—about the increasing unmarketability and the decline in sales of many types of works that used to sell better.* 

These anecdotal experiences seem to be reflected in polls and studies. In the United States, reading for pleasure is said to have fallen by 40% in the last 20 years. More than a third of people polled in the UK in 2025 say they hadn’t read a single book in a year. In late 2024, the OECD put out a reportclaiming that literacy levels were stagnating or in decline in many developing countries. 

A recent article in The Atlantic alleges there is a reading crisis in American universities, in which students appear to have a far lower capacity than their earlier counterparts at a much younger age to comprehend the same perennial classical works. The piece noted that students reading fiction often “struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.” The article also reported that some US middle and high schools have stopped assigning whole books, opting instead to teach snippets of books—partly as a result of changes to the educational system designed to make curricula more accessible for learners. University professors, faced with incoming students who can’t read whole books, are adapting by doing the same, thus compounding the problem.

So, what is happening, exactly? 

It’s still too early to grasp the precise degree and scale of the issue, but we may be witnessing the closing chapter of a unique epoch in human history born of a very special event: the sudden mass popularization of reading.

In 18^th-century Europe, a few hundred years after the invention of the printing press, there was an explosion in reading outside of elite circles. As education and affordable books became more accessible to those in the middle and sometimes lower classes, people across society started to voraciously consume any print materials they could get their hands on: books, pamphlets, and journals. This exposed them to a flurry of new ideas in the areas of politics, religion, philosophy, travel and the natural sciences. Poetry and fiction too became à la mode. That explosion in reading and the mass intellectual ferment it engendered led to the cultural pillars on which civilization today rests: the age of reason, the ascendancy of science, the birth of capitalism, and the consolidation of democracy in the West. Historians consider it a special enlightenment period in human history, known by some as “the reading revolution.” 

As the appearance of new tools in our evolution made previous methods and faculties obsolete, so did the invention of the printing press, which marked the decline of our older oral storytelling and communication culture with its emphasis on sound, memory, and the use and activation of various mental abilities. But book reading provided us with novel benefits in exchange. When reading, we are more distant from the writer and their ideas and can dispassionately analyze them. Because a written statement or argument exists in a fixed form, it is more easily evaluated and can be revisited and quoted. Writing, especially longer texts with complex ideas, helps us to consolidate and refine our own thoughts. Books also create a unique form of empathy, allowing us to walk in the shoes of an author (or a fictional character in a novel), located in a context far from us in time and space—and who embodies values and ideas quite at odds with our own.

“Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form,” writes Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy. “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”

Book reading saw a setback with the coming of radio and later television, which ate into our leisure time and provided us with stimulating and entertaining new media from which to garner information about the world. But it is our more recent entrancement with, and addiction to, internet offerings like YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix, as well as the cornucopia of podcasts and videos available on social media, that correlate with that dip in book reading so many of us see and from which there may be no return. This has led some commentators to herald that the death of book reading is at hand. We are reverting, such voices assert, to a more oral culture with its mix of positive and negative aspects, including the return of conditions that are anathema to democracy and tolerant societies. The decreasing desire and ability to read books is nothing short of tragic, a setback to our collective human potential and flourishing. 

But is it all doom and gloom for us, as some suggest? 

It is possible that as the screen-bludgeoned youth move into adulthood in coming generations, and as AI consolidates in ways we can’t quite imagine, there will be a deeper and wider abandonment of long-form reading, presaging a cultural dark age predicated on the shallowness of informational snippets. Because oral cultures are more emotional, persuasive, prone to rumor and superstition—and thus possibly more inaccurate—we may be entering a future where we are simply less knowledgeable and informed. Objectivity, along with analytical and contextual thinking, may suffer. This would have a knock-on effect on our politics, leading us further down an increasingly polarized path—perhaps catastrophically for societies. 

But there are other scenarios. 

It is my hope, and that of others, that books and book reading will not largely vanish, but may simply assume a smaller place in our culture. There may always be people, at least in the foreseeable future, who continue to read longer works (the publishing industry persists largely on revenue from frequent readers—and not the general public).With more countries banning smartphones in schools and limiting social media use among young people, and as more people ration their digital intake due to increasing screen fatigue, people will be rediscovering and devoting more time to the analog. 

Thus, a more optimistic outlook envisions an adjustment in which a reinvigorated oral and visual culture coexists with a reduced literary one. Speaking, listening and watching are simply more human and are more foundational than reading and writing—which partly explains our draw to podcasts, YouTube videos, and reels. It’s a mode in which we’ve always operated since before the reading revolution. Furthermore, reduced reading won’t put an end to learning, we would just continue to seek out information and learn in ways that are more centered around listening and looking, coming at questions and topics from that different mode of engagement.

“Across history we have had various balances of written and oral cultures, and if some further rebalancing is required in the direction of the oral, we should be able to make that work, just as we have done in the past,” writes Tyler Cowen, an American economic professor, in an article in The Free Press. “The rise of television, whatever you may think of it, did not do us in.”

If we’re fortunate, we’re not now barreling towards the end of the age of the book, but simply its golden age.

^{(*) After reaching a pinnacle during the pandemic, sales of print books remain steady in the industry’s target market which is avid readers: the small subset of the population for whom reading is an actual hobby, and who will often read double-digit numbers, and possibly dozens of books per year. The median person representing the majority population who read a few books per year and for whom reading may be declining so far hasn’t seemed to significantly impact sales numbers.}

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John Zada is a writer and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. His latest book is The Patchwork Cloak of Kamal Bey: An East-West Memoir.