The End of Reading Is Here

Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings.Explore the August 2026 IssueCheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read.View MoreMuch of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong.Traditionally, the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence.Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “

It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature. In 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series.

Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults. (Other titles in the top 10 include the children’s books Partypooper, the 20th installment in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and Dog Man: Big Jim Believes.) The most popular novel written for adults was the romantasy adventure Onyx Storm. Whatever the book’s pleasures, it isn’t Pasternak: “A muscle in his square jaw ticks as he stares down at me, rippling the tawny-brown skin of his stubbled cheek.”Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels. Some of the most popular are graphic novels: updated classics such as the Magic Tree House series for elementary-school students, and manga for middle and high schoolers.In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how.

People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text.

Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”From the November 2024 issue: Rose Horowitch on the elite college students who can’t read booksIllustration by The Atlantic. Source: Penguin Books.It may seem self-serving for a writer at a 169-year-old magazine to carry a torch for reading. But the people who make a living from words are not the only ones who lose out in a postliterate age. Reading is more than a skill, or one mode of communication among many. The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit. Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.Reading has never been natural. Humans have no innate cognitive machinery designed to string letters into words and connect them to their real-world analogues. To read, people had to repurpose regions of their brain used for speech and object recognition. The practice first emerged 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. For millennia afterward, most of the population was illiterate. Literacy became a mass phenomenon relatively recently, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440.The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries.