Most scare stories around the book industry make fabulous headlines, but are best read as fiction. The novel is alive, despite multiple doomsday predictions; the Kindle has so far failed to kill off the physical book; older teens and young adults bucked gloomy prophecies that their generation doesn’t read and helped to drive book sales up last year through #BookTok videos on the social media platform TikTok.
I’m with the optimists on the resilience of books, writing and publishing — but, like many people, I struggle at times to focus on reading for pleasure in our shimmering, omnipresent digital world. It’s a paradox of modern life: while our laptops and smartphones are saturated with text, we often find we have neither the time nor the attention to read for fun.
This problem is well-documented. In 2018, Miha Kovač and Adriaan van der Weel, two European academics, published a report on the changes in reading habits brought about by screen technologies. While literacy, measured in part by the amount of text consumed on the internet, seemed to be exploding, they pointed to the growing preference for pithy, succinct infobytes: “We are living in an era of proliferation of short texts and stagnation of long texts.”