Free Press – No one reads anymore. “This is something that teachers of literature like me are always saying. “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect,” wrote the scholar of literacy Martha Maxwell in 1979. But more and more, educators are finding that the last few years have been meaningfully different. Students are showing up at even high-end schools having never read a novel cover to cover. Columbia literature professor Nicholas Dames told The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch that his students “struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.” Last month, as students returned to school, a new study made headlines because it found that the number of Americans who read for pleasure has dropped an astonishing 40 percent since the start of the century. As a college teacher, I’ve noticed this trend too. My students are perfectly earnest, interested in the world, and even willing to take it on faith when I tell them it’s important to do the assigned reading. They’ve heard throughout their lives that reading is an important component of their future success. But many of them have never gotten much personal enjoyment out of it or seen for themselves what a book can give them that a Wikipedia entry can’t deliver more quickly. Covid school closures probably accelerated the problem. AI chatbots threw it into hyperdrive by offering on-demand, made-to-order, correct-enough summaries of (and essays about) any book you can google. But all ChatGPT really did was intensify our growing need to ask the question: Why read? What is it about sitting with a book, a quintessential experience of civilized life until very recently, that can’t be automated or replaced….

It may be a dying art. There is now a whole genre of social media posts about how to extract the value from books without reading them. “Reading books is now a waste of time,” wrote Davie Fogarty, whose bio on X credits him with “$850m in Shopify ecommerce sales.” Books are obsolete, thinks Fogarty, because “AI reasoning models can distill key insights and tell you exactly how to implement them based on everything they know about you.” And he’s perfectly right about that first kind of reading—the kind that self-help writing and business strategy manuals require, the kind that treats books merely as convenient packaging for “action items” which could just as well be slides on a PowerPoint deck. There has always been a cottage industry of digests and summaries, SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, to abridge that kind of reading. Now there are apps like Blinkist, which do the same thing using AI. It will be up to the new generation to decide which tasks they want to delegate to the machines. But if they choose reading, they will have cheated themselves terribly…”