Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!

Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.

But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.

Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing.

It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.

> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".

Personally, I read and write every day. I usually have 2-3 books I'm going through at any one time.

I've noticed that on long-haul flights, the movies typically hold no interest and I just read for hours—what a luxury to have nothing else to do!

We gave away our TV. The shows were just less compelling, we found. We don't miss it.

I feel like we tried to catch the wave, and almost did, but we were unable. It rolled out from under us and now we're floating once again in the calm sea beyond.

I have Moonreader installed on my phone, so I can reach for a book any time. This morning I was hypothesizing that since I use my phone for reading books, I'm fooling my brain into that association and maybe that's helpful in consuming long-form content online...?

I also read paper books, a Kobo, my computer, and an Xteink x4. Really anything, I guess!

That hardest part is knowing that more has been written than I will ever have time to enjoy.

> 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.

I wonder to what extent this can be attributed to decades-long release windows for some of these novels. I find myself alienated by the dominance of simple and childrens media among my age group peers, but I read Eragon as a child, kept up with the series, and have the 2023 release in the Eragon series on my books-to-read list. The Hunger Games started in 2008; I couldn't bemoan someone who was captivated at 13 then for enjoying the occasional release in 2025.

Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.

It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?

Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.

It's been a great way to solidify friendships, broaden my interests (Not every book that's been voted on was one I'd have picked alone), and cultivate a habit of reading and enjoying meaningful time with people.

I highly recommend anybody with friends who might be interested to reach out and give it a shot! It's been a delight! I've even branched off into hosting a movie club now with the same idea, just pick a movie weekly and watch it asynchronously, then hop on a call to discuss :)

I feel like if it took me 20hr to place a bet I'm probably not doing much of that either.

Anecdotal, but my 7y/o loves reading. She's flying through series' and it's getting pricey. I guess she falls in the 16% of people who enjoy it.

Now, when I have a few idle moments away from my computer, instead of checking something like reddit, I read a few pages from a book. It's great, I recommend it! I'm back to reading a couple of novels per month, and I don't have so much of that queasy wasted-time feeling that social media tends to give me. I've even learned how to pause reading mid-paragraph and resume easily later; that part took some practice.

In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:

> There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

  And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. 

People do read more than ever. But we don't recognize it as such. We read on our phone while intermittently reading subtitles of Netflix in the background. We read every time we look at a computer, phone, advertisement etc. But we only count reading paper as "real reading".

The shape of reading is changing yes. I think the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea. Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online. In some way losing this kind of stigma will make reading more accessible.

Writing and publishing is dying first. And that has to go long before reading dies anyway.

Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.

Similar to the sentiments expressed in the article, I do think something is lost when your mind is no longer allowed to wander before getting "to the point," but it's hard to articulate this loss clearly without reaching for vague justifications like "aesthetics". However, I also don't think we should force our kids just to read for the sake of reading; I think there should be some intrinsic desire to read a well-articulated sentence, whether it be from books or articles or even Twitter, and it's the seeming lack of that desire which is sad to see.

Uhm, what about Facebook, web-based news articles, and internet message boards? What about video games that involve significant reading?

The above statement is just so biased about what reading is, that I discarded the article as alarmist!

Just because someone isn't reading what you want them to, doesn't make them illiterate.

But books also have drawbacks:

1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.

2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.

3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.

There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.

If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.

In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.

Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.

And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'

What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'

So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.

I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.

Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.

Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.

Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.

There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.

What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read.

The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.

The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.

The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.

I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.

People read when they feel secure. We don't live in a particularly secure society.

> The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London.

It's less that we've forgotten to read and more that technology has made maintaining the historical pretense of mass intellectualism non-viable. The mass bulk of humanity has always been this stupid. Curiosity, epistemic discipline, critical thinking, and counterfactual evaluation have always been the privilege and burden of a few. We've only pretended otherwise to flatter our sense of fair-mindedness, which itself is sparsely distributed among the primate biomass of humanity.

Reality punishes you for refusing to model it properly. A non-predictive theory is worthless. An anti-predictive theory is a hazard. Let's remediate the epistemic toxic waste that is the idea that everyone is capable of the highest level of thought if only properly trained. If you're out in public, look around. A good chunk of the people you see can't understand, having had breakfast, that if they hadn't, they'd be hungry. When you're selected into an environment of concentrated rigor, you lose track of just how dumb most people are. The article is sad yet unsurprising.

I don't read books though. I've probably read one novel in the past five years. I used to read more books, newspapers, and magazines and can't really say why I don't anymore other than the news and magazine content is all online now, and it just doesn't seem like there is time left in the day to sit down with a book.

Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?

> Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.

"Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century"

https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/fa...

Even if the foregoing is completely false and abhorrent to you, we must also come to terms with a "new literacy" in terms of ideograms and emoji. I am learning how to type emoji, and replace many textual expressions with singular emoji and symbols. Computers and electronic devices, as well as our own garments, are frequently labeled with ideograms that transcend human language, but must be interpreted for proper use.

I have noticed some people around me who aren't really good at reading at all, and this is a real handicap to them when paperwork, and computer readouts, and just signs posted all over, are full of words, and our world surrounds us in words to read and comprehend, and if we can't read at lightning-speed levels, and comprehend what we read, we find ourselves at distinct evolutionary/legal/financial/social disadvantages.

So I contend that future literacy will increasingly involve non-English emoji and symbology, and that not every human in the world needs to be literate in a particular written language, and while a majority of society can afford such an education, nothing of value may be lost.

* Replicating speech, Archiving speech, and separating the acts of speaking and listening from each other. There are alternatives to written format.

* Speech that can be edited easily, until it is perfected.

* Speech that be sped up, slowed down, and jumped around with random access and search.

* Silent speech.

These features can be achieved with alternative technologies.

Written communication also has drawbacks. It is a lossy compression of spoken speech.

(then again, if I have the time to write an unnecessary comment, then I also have the time to read something)

Books have the potential to better the mind, but they don't do so simply by being written words. The books must be of a certain artistic caliber. The push to get people reading in general cannot be the end goal. The end goal is to get people to read quality books, to better the mind, affirm life, practice empathy, experience pathos, feel the grace of God. Too many forget this is the end goal and just think reading words on paper is somehow intrinsically a noble endeavor.

I think the common advice to get people into books is wrong and misses the point. "Find a fun trashy book and just read it" is maybe not productive advice unless attention rehabilitation is needed. Sure, some of those people might eventually stumble upon a good book, but advice can be much more efficient than that.

Here's what I would recommend to a burgeoning reader: There are many easy and fun books that have artistic merit; read those. Find them via Booktok lists from pretentious looking people, or common school reading lists, or wherever; generally only read things you have heard of or that you saw on a list somewhere; don't randomly pick off the shelf. Teenager classics like 1984, Book of the New Sun, Kafka on the Shore, American Psycho, Lord of the Rings are fun and easy reads that have meat on the bone. Ignore the airport novel and anything published recently. The average book has the same lack of value as the average TV show, just less entertaining, more boring, and more effortful to experience. Why would you waste time and effort consuming boring, less entertaining media when the phone and the TV are right there? But when you find good books, there is no replacement; you are doing an entirely different thing than mindlessly entertaining yourself. That is what we're trying to do.

I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.

Jerry ”I read,” Elaine “Books, Jerry. Books.”

Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.