The End of Reading — Or Just the End of a Brief Interlude?

Rose Horowitch has an article in The Atlantic which argues, more or less, that we are living through the second fall of the Library of Alexandria — only this time nobody has burned anything down. We've just stopped reading.

Her evidence is genuinely grim. Fewer than half of US adults read a book of any kind in 2022. The share of Americans reading for pleasure has slid from 28% in 2004 to 16% today. Under 10% of twentysomethings read newspapers, against roughly half of them in 1975. And her conclusion is the bit that lodges in the brain: the literate era may turn out to have been "a brief interlude" between the oral world and the digital one.

This isn't just an American problem

Before anyone in Britain gets comfortable, the domestic numbers are much the same. The Reading Agency's most recent survey found that 53% of UK adults consider themselves regular readers — up slightly on 2024's 50%, but down on the 58% recorded in 2015. Around 35% describe themselves as former readers who have simply stopped, and 24% of 16-24 year olds say they have never been readers at all. The barriers people cite are exactly what you'd expect: no time, can't focus, social media.

That last group is the one that ought to worry us. "Used to read, stopped" is a habit lost. "Never been a reader" is a habit never formed — and it's concentrated among the young.

Why sociologists should care more than book-lovers do

The temptation here is to treat this as a taste issue — a bit of middle-class hand-wringing about people preferring TikTok to Tolstoy. Horowitch's stronger claim is that reading isn't a hobby, it's an infrastructure. It's how you build what she calls the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis: holding a long argument in your head, spotting where it contradicts itself, connecting it to something you read three years ago.

Those are precisely the skills a democracy runs on. If you can't sustain attention through 4,000 words, your politics is going to be conducted entirely through headlines, clips and vibes — which, if you've glanced at the last few election cycles, may explain rather a lot.

There's also a straightforward inequality angle. Reading ability tracks class closely, and always has. A society that quietly abandons the written word doesn't level the playing field; it just means the people who still read long, difficult things retain an advantage that's now invisible, because nobody's competing for it.

The case for calm

I should say Horowitch has her critics, and some of them have a point. Every communication technology since the printing press has been greeted with a prophecy of intellectual collapse — television was going to end critical thought sixty years ago. Horowitch herself notes that The Atlantic ran a panic about newspapers destroying book-reading 126 years ago, and cheerfully accepts she may look equally silly in another 126. Trend data on "reading for pleasure" also depends heavily on what counts — audiobooks, long-form online journalism, fanfiction. People may be reading differently rather than less.

Final thoughts

I don't think we're heading for a new dark age. But I do think the "never been a reader" figure is the one to watch, because habits that never form are much harder to recover than habits that lapse. The interesting sociological question isn't whether books survive — they will, as a minority pursuit — but what happens to a public sphere in which sustained argument becomes a specialist skill rather than a general one.

Personally, I'm going to keep reading. Partly out of stubbornness, mostly because the alternative appears to be forming opinions from short videos, and I've seen where that ends up.

Sources

The Reading Agency, The State of the Nation's Adult Reading: 2025 Report — https://readingagency.org.uk/the-state-of-the-nations-adult-reading-2025-report/
NPR, Are we living through the end of reading? (interview with Rose Horowitch) — https://www.npr.org/2026/07/11/nx-s1-5886268/are-we-living-through-the-end-of-reading