JAYME POISSON: Hi, I’m Jayme Poisson.
JP: I was just reading this piece by Atlantic writer Rose Horowitch that has a pretty dire headline: “The end of reading is here.” She makes the case that across the board, people are reading less. Fewer than half of all American adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. And even when they are reading, they’re reading stuff that’s shorter and simpler. Rose argues that this decline in reading has a dramatic effect on not only our leisure time, the education system, but also the way that we think and structure society. She is my guest today.
JP: Rose, hey, it’s great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for making the time.
ROSE HOROWITCH: Thank you for having me.
JP: I want to start with the big picture here. In what ways is reading on the decline?
ROSE HOROWITCH: There’s pretty convincing data showing this. So, you know, the share of American adults who read a book or an article on any given day declined by 40% over the past 20 years. And, you know, as you said previously, you know, fewer than half of all adults read a book of any kind in 2022, which is the most recent year that we have really great data for. And, you know, I note in the piece that gambling is now a more popular leisure activity than reading is.
JP: Yeah, I see you said last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet; fewer than half of adults reported reading a book. You know, we don’t have a lot of great data here in Canada. There’s this organization called BookNet Canada that surveys Canadians’ reading habits from a pool of about 1,200 people. And they found a pretty steady trend in people who have read at least one book a year from 2019 to 2025. So, you know, I do hope that the situation is a little bit less dire in Canada, but I don’t think it’s much. You know, it’s interesting because by some measures, books are thriving, right? Last year in the U.S., print book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. Here in Canada book sales have held steady the last few years. There’s Booktalk, Bookstagram. Dua Lipa and Reese Witherspoon have hugely popular book clubs. Doesn’t that run against the idea that reading is on the decline?
ROSE HOROWITCH: Yeah, so you point out this really interesting tension that I tried to talk about in my article. You know, there are all these signs that book reading is thriving, and, you know, new bookstores keep opening. And so there are all of these kind of positive anecdotal signals. But I think that when we really dig into the data, what we see with that is that the people who do read are more dedicated to the text maybe than they ever have been before. We know that they spend more time reading than they used to, that they sort of identify more closely as readers. But this is just becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of society. You know, last year, 20% of Americans read 80% of all the books that were read. And so, that is just a change in kind of what we’re seeing. And I think that’s what’s leading to kind of these positive anecdotal signals, is that it’s just really among this small minority.
JP: Tell me more about how we’re seeing the decline play out across age and gender, for example.
ROSE HOROWITCH: So this is a decline that really seems to cut across different demographic groups. You know, historically we’ve always seen college graduates, you know, people who are retired, women reading more than other groups. And, you know, we still see a lot of those similar patterns, but just that there’s been, you know, really a decline for everyone, and that kind of no group has been immune from it. Something that I found really interesting in my reporting was looking at kind of reading habits of the next generation of, you know, today’s young people. And I think what we see there is that today’s young people like to read a lot less than today’s adults did when they were kids. And so I think that we can kind of only expect to see this trend accelerate in the years to come just because of what the data is showing us of the people who are coming of age now.
JP: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And in 2024, in a national test, just 35% of high school seniors were proficient at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. But the same number scored below basic, meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text. And you know, it’s not just books when we talk about reading, right? People are also consuming news differently, for example.
ROSE HOROWITCH: Yes, we definitely see a big change in the way people are kind of taking in their news. You know, in a survey, 40% of Americans said that they prefer to watch or listen to online news than to read it. And so that is just a big change kind of driven by technological capabilities in the way people take in information. It was much less kind of sitting down and reading the newspaper, you know, even digitally, and more sort of, you know, we’re seeing the rise of podcasts and, you know, both audio and video as ways to get news.
JP: And so, why would that necessarily be a negative thing?
ROSE HOROWITCH: What I argue in the piece is that we are entering a post-literate society and that the medium that we kind of use to communicate with each other really does shape the way that we experience the world. And so, it’s not so much that it’s strictly a negative always, but just that this is a really profound change. That, you know, when reading and writing, you know, first appeared 6,000 years ago, that that really fundamentally changed, you know, society, and we saw changes in how people thought and in politics and culture. And then now we can expect changes of the same magnitude in, you know, shifts in our consciousness, in our politics and in what our culture values. And so that was really what I was trying to point to, is that this is a sort of bigger shift than we can even see in the statistics. It’s really a, you know, world historical phenomenon.
JP: When you say post-literate society, what do you mean by that versus illiterate, for example?
ROSE HOROWITCH: Right, so it’s interesting, because people often refer to this as a literacy crisis, and I don’t think that’s quite right. You know, if you look compared to historic levels, our literacy rate is quite high in the United States. And at the same time with, you know, emails and text messages and social media posts, we’re probably reading more words than we’ve ever read before. But I think the difference is that this sort of emphasis on snippets of text and just constantly taking in kind of words, has meant that we don’t really have the time or the inclination or practice to kind of really focus in for a sustained period of time on a rich and complex work.
JP: And then just flesh out for me the consequences of that, right? Like what do studies show about the connection between reading more complex stuff and people’s attention spans, ability to focus, use logic?
ROSE HOROWITCH: Well, it’s definitely still an area of active research, but, you know, I spoke with a dozen cognitive scientists and what they were talking about was that really one of the bedrocks of neuroscience is that people’s brains get good at what they practice. And so we know that if people aren’t reading as much, you know, they’re going to kind of have less background knowledge and vocabulary, you know, to be able to kind of use to aid in comprehension. They’re going to be less practiced at kind of persisting through something without shifting their attention. So it’s going to feel a lot more challenging, even if they technically could pay attention. And we also see that we sort of don’t practice some of those higher order cognitive abilities. So, you know, of synthesis and comprehension and analysis, like, if we don’t practice those, we’re kind of just not as accustomed to doing them. And so it just makes it much harder. And reading is something that really exercises a lot of those things.
JP: You make the point that reading wasn’t natural. At one point in history, society shifted from orality to literacy. This guy, Walter J. Ong, who spent much of his life studying this transition and its impact on society, argues that literacy is not just a skill, but also a way of structuring society’s way of thinking. And just talk to me a little bit more about that.
ROSE HOROWITCH: So I thought it was really interesting that I think we tend to think of reading as something that’s innate and kind of inevitable. But actually, if you think about it, I mean, reading and writing only appeared about 6,000 years ago, which is very recent in human history. And so it’s not something that is inevitable at all. You know, reading could totally go away and that would not be kind of unusual if we’re looking on a really long timescale. And so, you know, what Walter Ong did was he looked at, you know, oral societies and then at literate societies and really looked at kind of what were the affordances of this new medium of reading and writing. And he found that reading and writing are just a fundamentally different way of kind of delivering information. When you write, it forces you to slow down much more than when you’re speaking. You can see it, you know, reflected back at you, so you can go back to it and kind of get new understanding. It separates, you know, the writer from what they’re writing, and so it allows for a more dispassionate spread of information.
JP: You track the history of literacy in the U.S., how it was this destabilizing force that helped foment anti-British sentiment, and America’s founders used print documents to build support for a new nation. And just could you talk to me more about the connection between literacy and nation building in the U.S.?
ROSE HOROWITCH: Right, so what I wanted to get across first with the affordances of print, you know, in America’s founding was first that print was actually, like, hugely destabilizing. And, you know, we might think of it and kind of lionize it as something that, you know, makes us really [unclear] methodical and rational. And there certainly are parts of that, but at the same time, you know, American founders were, you know, using it to spread, I guess, what we would now call like misinformation or disinformation. And they were using newspapers to kind of whip people up into a frenzy. So I think that that’s something that’s really important to remember as we kind of think about new technologies. That, you know, there’s always a period of kind of discomfort, figuring out how something works and how we can sort of incorporate it into our society. And then at the same time, you know, Benjamin Franklin created America’s first lending library. And, you know, from the start, the founders really emphasized having an informed populace that could be trusted to govern themselves. And they thought that reading in print and newspapers was a crucial part of that. So it is really interesting the way that America was kind of, you know, built with this idea.
JP: I know that even before this particular piece, you’ve been reporting on how reading has been on the decline amongst college students. And just what did they tell you about their relationship to reading? I think back to this time in my life, and like books were a pretty big part of it. How are they talking about it to you now?
ROSE HOROWITCH: Yeah. Right, so, you know, a couple of years ago I wrote a piece about college students that were, you know, arriving in college, even elite universities, just not prepared to read books because they hadn’t been asked to in middle and high school. So that was something that pointed a lot more to, you know, things that might be happening in the schools. And then as I was reporting this story, you know, I spoke with a researcher who led focus groups of high school students. And he was saying that many of them described reading for pleasure as an alien practice. So I think that, you know, we do see kind of some isolation from text and just feeling like it’s not really applicable. So that to me was just a really stark change from, from yeah, the way, you know, I thought about reading at the time.
JP: Those students that you’re talking about, they’re at Columbia, right? And they said that they weren’t expected to read books in high school. I mean, like, what do you think’s going on there?
ROSE HOROWITCH: Yeah, so for that piece in 2024, there– you know, I talked to professors who were at Columbia and who were telling me about their students at other universities as well. And, you know, I think what we see, and I talked about in this piece as well, is that middle and high schools are assigning fewer books. In a survey last year, most middle and high school teachers said that they assign between zero and four books a year, and they are really supposed to emphasize reading comprehension questions, you know, about short excerpts. And so that is really a change in the way instruction is being done. And so we could see that if students aren’t being asked to kind of read as much, there’s really going to be a stamina challenge when they arrive at university.
JP: Huh. Right, they can’t like get through it.
JP: Tell me more about how the educators are trying to grapple with this decline in reading, and how it’s affecting, I guess, the way that they teach.
ROSE HOROWITCH: So I definitely did talk to some educators who, you know, were mentioning — you know, I spoke with one librarian who was saying that she’s had to get books that were, like, are sort of at lower reading levels to accommodate students after the pandemic. You know, one other thing that’s, you know, that was interesting in my reporting was I did speak to a teacher who was saying that he thinks that there’s starting to be some backlash against excerpts and sort of a move back towards full books. So I think this will be a really interesting thread to follow to see if this shift sort of starts to reverse over time.
JP: You’ve quoted the literary scholar Martha Maxwell in your writing, who said that “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” And she wrote that in 1979, or said that in 1979. Do you think that something different is going on here this time around?
ROSE HOROWITCH: You know, I always try when I write these pieces to be really cognizant that, you know, people are always worried about new technologies and they’re always concerned about–
JP: Yeah, and the youth. Yeah.
ROSE HOROWITCH: Yeah. No, completely. And you know, I quoted in this piece an Atlantic article from 126 years ago. It was really nervous about what the daily newspaper was gonna do to people’s book reading habits, and thought that it would, like, distract people with frivolous things and they wouldn’t have any time to read serious books. And so, you know, I definitely wanted to be open to the possibility that in 126 years, like, this will look really silly and someone will use it as an example in, you know, a different article. But I think at the same time, you know, something that I certainly found through, you know, studying the history of this is that even as people worry, like, technologies do ebb and flow and things do go up and down and it really is a change. You know, I think back to, I quoted in this piece Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates is really worried about what the advent of writing is going to do to people’s memories, and he thinks that, you know, they’ll write things down and then they won’t exercise their memory and they’ll just become incredibly forgetful. And a lot of people use that to dismiss a lot of present concerns, but I actually think that that can be interpreted in a different way. In a lot of ways, like, Plato was right. Socrates was right, there. Who could memorize The Iliad or the Odyssey today? Like, we don’t practice. And that, it’s just not a skill that we select for. And so it’s something that would be really hard to do. At the same time, you know, I think a lot of people would argue that reading and writing has been worth it. So, you know, I think it, it is fair. We can see that there really are trade-offs. And, you know, even if we might get something really amazing, we also are going to be losing something as we adopt new technologies and sort of discard old ones.
JP: How are you thinking about AI in all of this?
ROSE HOROWITCH: So, you know, I write a lot and, you know, we’ve spoken a lot about how other technologies kind of threaten reading and, you know, I argue in the piece that AI is the first technology to really affect writing and threaten writing. And the reason I think that that could pose a problem is because writing is how we really figure out what we think. And often I find in my own work that I think I know what I’m going to say, and I think I know what I’m thinking, and then I try to write it down and I realize I actually had no idea what I was thinking or it goes in a completely different direction. And so the concern that is sort of starting to emerge from early studies and from my conversations with experts was just that if people become overly reliant on AI to do their writing for them, you know, they won’t kind of practice forming their own opinions, and they’ll kind of have this false sense of confidence that they really do understand something, but, you know, actually they might not. And so that was the concern that was coming up. Um. I mean, at the same time, we don’t want to be too precious. I’m sure that if people use AI to write their emails, it’s probably not gonna have, you know, a huge cognitive cost, but it is very hard to just sort of selectively offload only the tasks that you want to and make sure that you don’t kind of cut out anything that is really cognitively useful.
JP: Yeah. Although I do wonder if even just having it write all your emails is gonna also be a real problem for thinking. Could I just ask you about the reaction that you’ve gotten to this piece? Like, how are people responding to it? Do they care?
ROSE HOROWITCH: Um, you know, it seems that people do care, which has been heartening. You know, I never know what to expect when you put a piece out into the world, but so far, the response has been fairly positive. And it seems that people, you know, the experiences, the personal experiences that I described in the piece do resonate with people, and that this is an issue that people care about.
JP: I mean, there is, there is nothing really that I think can compare to losing yourself in a book. It is one of the greatest things I think you can do. How has reporting out this piece changed the way that you think about your own reading and writing habits?
ROSE HOROWITCH: You know, I wrote at the end about my personal experience with reading. And how I was raised, reading was really important in my family. My parents read to me and passed down their favourite books. And I really fell in love with reading, and felt almost a responsibility to read, you know, a lot and kind of learn about the things that had been passed down through generations and that people had deemed worthy of maintaining. And I talk also in the piece about how, you know, I’ve noticed that I read less than I used to when I was younger. I spend more time working and more time, you know, on my phone and everything. And so I think it’s definitely made me more cognizant about that and just thinking, how do I be more intentional with where I really want to devote my time and, you know, how I want to value or prioritize reading.
JP: Yeah, I like have friends that — well, the exec. of the show, he gets up at like 5 in the morning to read. I mean, it’s it’s, it’s really heartening when I hear those– I am not getting up at 5 in the morning to read. But, uh, it is heartening when you hear those people who are really trying to carve it, carve it out, um, in their day. This was great. Rose, thank you so much.
ROSE HOROWITCH: Thank you, Jayme. Yeah, I really appreciate it.
JP: All right, that is all for today. Front Burner was produced this week by Joyita Sengupta, Matthew Amha, Kevin Sexton, Cecelia Armstrong, Sam McNulty, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producers are Elaine Chau and Imogen Birchard. I’m Jayme Poisson. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.
Source: CBC Radio