In a 2023 blog post called “The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing,” Berrett-Koehler Publishers reported that books published by traditional publishers have exploded to an estimated 500,000 to 1 million new titles every year, along with more than 2 million books that are self-published annually and compete for the attention of a shrinking number of readers.
The marketplace can’t absorb all of those books, particularly at a time when people are less interested in reading and are getting more of their information from the internet and social media, often through video.
In a 2017 study on how smartphones affect cognition, researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia found that “habitual involvement with these devices may have a negative and lasting impact on users’ ability to think, remember, pay attention, and regulate emotion.”
If people can’t think, remember or pay attention, and social media is manipulating their emotions and filling their heads with nonsense, how can they read? The evidence is anecdotal, and correlation doesn’t prove causation, but we know that cellphone use is up, while book reading is down.
A report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that the average score for literacy in the United States was 12 points lower in 2023 than it had been just six years earlier, in 2017. In terms of reading skills, the percentage of low-performing adults in the U.S. increased, from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023. At the same time, the percentage of high-performing U.S. readers decreased, from 48 percent in 2017 to 44 percent in 2023.
As a November 2024 article in The Atlantic reported, “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FURTHER THREATENS READING
Now, after decades of declines in Americans’ book-reading habits, a new threat to literacy marches over the horizon, in the form of artificial intelligence.
For a 2025 report, Elon University in North Carolina asked hundreds of technology experts to predict how AI might degrade people’s cognitive and social abilities over the next 10 years. The report quotes Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consulting professor at Stanford University, as predicting that “by 2035, humans [will] have become so accustomed to AIs reading books for them and then reporting out a summary that most humans can no longer read on their own.”
Arguably, we’re already halfway to this illiterate future, as more people rely on robots to do their thinking for them and fewer people buy or read books. As one tech expert in Elon University’s report foresees, by 2035 human cognitive abilities will atrophy, as a “self-inflicted AI dementia” overtakes the populace.
Not everyone is pessimistic about the future of reading, however. Ellen Winner, a professor emerita in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College and a senior research associate at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, concedes that “Some people today only read nonfiction and they only read it for information and will be happy with a summary.”
But as Winner tells Moresby Press, other “non-fiction readers relish following an author’s argument and evaluating the evidence, and would not want just a summary, just as people won’t substitute a summary of a film for watching the film. Others enjoy reading literature—novels, stories, poems. These people will never substitute that [experience] for a summary. The idea of a summary of Hamlet or of a T.S. Eliot poem is ludicrous. It is in no way a substitute.”
Winner, whose most recent book is An Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse (2021), about art education in the United States, says that “People love the experience of reading, the suspense of a novel. They love the feeling of being moved from literature.”
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