The Library Died of Neglect
Reading is collapsing into a niche hobby. Here is why you should join the holdouts, and why you should keep writing even when nobody reads it.
I write a few thousand words every week, and I do it knowing that most of the people I write for will never read them.
That is not false modesty. It is arithmetic. I can see the open rates. I know the difference between a subscriber and a reader. I have written four books, with a fifth on the way. I write this newsletter, and over the years I have written for Forbes, Entrepreneur, and The Wall Street Journal. Which is to say I have spent a meaningful portion of my adult life producing exactly the kind of writing that people are reading less and less of, and I have the anecdotes to prove it.
I have lost count of the people who have congratulated me on a book, quoted its title back to me, or told me they bought a copy, while making it gently clear in the same conversation that they never actually read the thing. Friends ask me for “the gist” of an essay I spent a week thinking through. Colleagues respond to a long piece within ninety seconds of it landing in their inbox, which tells me exactly how much of it they absorbed. My students at ASU, some of the brightest young people I have ever worked with, will admit without much embarrassment that they ran the assigned reading through an AI summarizer and skimmed the output on their phone.
None of this offends me. I understand the forces at work, and I will get to them in a moment. But I recently read a piece in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch called “The End of Reading Is Here,” and it has been rattling around in my head ever since. It crystallized something I have felt for years as someone who writes for a living audience that is quietly disappearing. The piece argues that the age of reading, the roughly five centuries in which ordinary people routinely engaged with long, complex written works, may turn out to be a brief interlude in human history rather than a permanent achievement.
I think she is largely right about the diagnosis. I want to talk about what we do with it.
The Fire Is Not What Killed the Library
Horowitch opens her essay with the Library of Alexandria, and the detail she surfaces is the one worth holding onto. For centuries, the popular story was that the library died by fire: Julius Caesar’s siege in 48 B.C.E., or the mob that sacked the temple four hundred years later. Dramatic, external, sudden. A tragedy inflicted from outside.
Contemporary historians mostly reject that story. The library died of negligence. Papyrus scrolls do not keep themselves; humidity, mice, and insects eat them slowly, and scribes had to continually recopy the collection just to hold ground against decay. At some point, the cost of maintaining the library exceeded the will to maintain it. The classics scholar Roger Bagnall put it in terms I have not been able to shake: it is not that the loss of the library caused a dark age. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.
Think about that for a moment. The greatest collection of knowledge in the ancient world was not destroyed by an enemy. It was simply not renewed by its friends.
That is the correct frame for what is happening to reading now, because nobody is burning anything. The numbers Horowitch assembles are stark. Fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind in 2022. The share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. More Americans placed a bet last year than read a novel. Reading stamina among students has collapsed to the point where most middle and high school English teachers now assign somewhere between zero and four full books a year, and college professors report teaching students how to comprehend a text at all before they can teach anything else.
And here is the detail that should concern anyone who cares about institutions: the decline cuts across every demographic. Retirees, women, college graduates, the groups that always read the most, are all reading dramatically less. This is not a story about one generation or one class. It is a story about the whole culture quietly deciding, one evening at a time, that the maintenance is no longer worth the effort.
We Are Not Illiterate. We Are Postliterate.
The precision of that word matters. Americans are probably consuming more written words than at any point in history: texts, posts, captions, headlines, chat threads, notifications. What has evaporated is not decoding. It is sustained attention to long, complex, structured argument. The cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls this the loss of deep reading, the higher-order work of comprehension, inference, and synthesis. You can still read the words. You are just losing the ability to hold a long thought in your mind while an author builds it.
I see the evidence everywhere, and if you are honest with yourself, so do you. Horowitch cites a study in which English majors, students who chose to study literature, were asked to read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House. A quarter of them interpreted Dickens’s figures of speech literally and concluded that dinosaurs were walking the streets of nineteenth-century London. Only 5 percent came away with an accurate understanding of what they had read. These students had the entire internet available to look up anything they did not understand. They did not bother.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Every generation panics about the new medium. Jefferson worried that novels would ruin young women. In 1900, The Atlantic itself published a lament that the newspaper was destroying Americans’ capacity for serious thought. The doomsayers are always the people most invested in the old way. Fair enough. That skepticism is healthy, and Horowitch takes it seriously; she quotes a Harvard literature professor who spent his whole career dismissing exactly these panics, right up until the last few years, when he stopped dismissing them. What changed his mind is what should change yours: this time the data all point the same direction, the decline is accelerating rather than plateauing, and there is no plausible mechanism for a return. Television competed with books for evenings. The phone competes with books for every conscious minute.
What Atrophies When Nobody Reads
I watch what happens inside organizations when reading atrophies. Decisions get made off summaries of summaries. A carefully constructed memo gets skimmed, and the nuance that took hours to get right, the qualifications, the second-order risks, the reasoning behind the recommendation, evaporates somewhere between the second paragraph and the reply button. People form strong opinions about documents they have not read, and because everyone is doing it, nobody flags it. At B:Side, we work in small business lending, a world of credit memos, loan agreements, and regulatory guidance where the substance lives in the details. In our industry, the person who actually reads the document has a quiet, compounding advantage over the person who read the executive summary. I suspect that is true in yours as well.
The classroom version of this is more painful because the stakes are more personal. My students are not lazy, and I want to be clear about that. They are rational actors responding to the environment they were raised in. They have never known a world without infinite short-form video, and they have been trained by every institution around them, including their schools, to treat text as an inefficient container for information: something to be compressed, summarized, and extracted from, rather than experienced. Horowitch quotes a Harvard administrator explaining that some students now genuinely believe professors who assign whole books are arbitrarily withholding information by forcing them through a needlessly difficult medium. I have heard versions of that sentiment in my own classroom, delivered without irony, by students I admire.
And here is where my own experience as a writer stops being an anecdote and becomes evidence. When people engage with my books through their titles, or my essays through their subject lines, they are not being rude. They are being modern. The gist, the summary, the takeaway: this is now the default unit of intellectual exchange. What gets lost is precisely the thing long-form writing exists to carry, which is not information at all. It is reasoning. A summary can tell you what I concluded. Only the essay can show you how I got there, where I almost went instead, and what it would take to change my mind. Strip that away and all that remains is a stranger’s opinion, which you are free to ignore, and probably should.
Why Reading Still Matters
So why keep at it? Why read whole books in a world that has politely moved on?
The first reason is cognitive, and it is not sentimental. Reading is a workout for the attention span, and attention is upstream of everything else you do. The research Horowitch surveys is consistent: deep reading builds the capacity for inference, synthesis, and holding complex ideas in mind across time. Watching video, for all the information it carries, is passive by comparison; the frames keep moving whether or not you have understood anything. The less you read, the harder reading becomes, and the harder reading becomes, the harder thinking becomes. That loop runs in both directions, which is the good news. It is a muscle, and muscles respond to training at any age.
The second reason is that reading is becoming scarce, and scarce capabilities command a premium. Just 20 percent of adults now account for more than 80 percent of the books read in America. A historian of reading quoted in the piece compares it to stamp collecting or growing orchids: a niche hobby. I would put it differently. When a foundational skill becomes a niche practice, the niche inherits the advantage. The person who can sit with a forty-page credit agreement, a dense regulatory proposal, or a serious book on the history of financial crises, and actually comprehend it, is no longer competing with everyone. They are competing with the one person in five who still can. I have written before about the evaporating bottom rungs of the career ladder, and this is the same dynamic in another costume. In an economy where AI generates infinite plausible text, the ability to evaluate text, to notice what is missing, what is wrong, and what is manipulative, becomes one of the few genuinely defensible human skills.
The third reason is older and harder to quantify. Books are how the dead talk to the living. They are the vertical transmission of culture, wisdom passed down across generations, and that channel is being replaced by a horizontal one in which twenty-two-year-olds learn primarily from other twenty-two-year-olds, at 2x speed. James Baldwin said that Dostoevsky and Dickens taught him that the things which tormented him most were the very things that connected him with everyone who had ever been alive. I felt that as a young man reading Marcus Aurelius for the first time, discovering that a Roman emperor lay awake at night wrestling with the same doubts about duty and mortality and self-command that I did. No feed will ever give you that, because the feed is optimized for this hour, and the books that last were written for the centuries.
The Writer Gets More Than the Reader
Now for the part of this argument that I believe most strongly, and that the postliterate world understands least.
Even if nobody read a word I wrote, I would keep writing, because writing is not primarily an act of communication. It is an act of cognition. The writer benefits before the reader ever arrives, and more than the reader ever will.
Here’s the truth: you do not actually know what you think about something until you have tried to write it down. Before the writing, what you have is a comfortable fog, a set of intuitions and borrowed phrases that feel like a position. Writing is the process of running that fog through a compressor. Every vague notion has to become a sentence, every sentence has to survive contact with the next one, and the weak links do not survive. Cal Newport makes this point in Horowitch’s essay: writing forces thought into an orderly, linear form and exposes flabby reasoning like nothing else. Orwell compared writing a book to a long bout of a painful illness, and he kept doing it anyway, because the pain is the point. The difficulty of writing is not friction on the way to the product. The difficulty is the product. The struggle is where the thinking happens.
The best evidence for this claim is also the best book I know. Meditations was never meant to be read by anyone. Marcus Aurelius wrote it to himself, at night, in a military camp on a frozen frontier, with no audience and no expectation of publication. It is literally a private notebook, and it has survived for nearly two thousand years precisely because writing without an audience is the most honest thinking a person can do. The most enduring work of practical philosophy in Western history has an intended readership of one. If that does not settle the question of whether writing is worth doing when nobody is reading, I am not sure what would.
This is also why I am wary of the frictionless promise of AI writing, even as I run a company that embraces AI aggressively and teach my students to do the same. The early research Horowitch cites matches what I see: when people outsource the writing, the output improves and the thinking degrades. Students who studied with AI performed worse on tests that demanded reflection, not because the machine gave them wrong answers, but because it did their struggling for them. If writing is how the writer learns, then a tool that eliminates the writing eliminates the learning, no matter how good the prose looks. Use AI to critique your draft, pressure-test your argument, and find what you missed. Do not use it to spare yourself the labor of the first draft, because that labor was never overhead. It was the whole exercise.
What This Means in Practice
I try to avoid diagnosis without prescription, so let me be concrete about what I actually recommend, whether you are running a company, building a career, or raising the next generation of readers.
Read whole books, slowly, on paper if you can. Not excerpts, not summaries, not the podcast where the author repeats the introduction. The compounding benefit lives in the sustained middle chapters that the summary skips. Start with thirty minutes and accept that it will feel difficult at first. It is supposed to. That is the muscle rebuilding.
Write regularly, whether or not anyone reads it. A journal, a weekly memo to yourself, a letter you never send. Judge the practice by the clarity it produces in you, not by the audience it attracts. Marcus Aurelius had no subscribers.
Do the first draft yourself. Let AI sharpen your thinking after you have done the thinking. The moment you delegate the blank page, you have delegated the learning, and the learning was the only part that was ever yours.
If you lead people, read what you decide on, and be seen doing it. The reading culture of an organization is set at the top, the same way its emotional ceiling is. When the boss visibly engages with the full document, summaries stop being a safe substitute for everyone below.
If you have children in your life, read to them, past the age when it seems necessary. The single most protective factor in Horowitch’s essay is the one that costs nothing: a family where reading is simply what people do. Her father read to her through middle school. That, more than any curriculum, is why she can write for The Atlantic.
Tending the Scrolls
I keep returning to those scribes in Alexandria, because their job description turns out to be the moral of the whole story. The scrolls did not need to be defended from armies most of the time. They needed to be recopied, continually, by people who decided the effort was worth it. Literacy was never a possession. It was a practice, renewed one generation at a time, and it dies not by fire but by the quiet withdrawal of effort.
The worst thing you can do with all of this is despair, and conclude that the culture is lost and your own habits do not matter. The second worst thing is to congratulate yourself for having read this far and change nothing. The people who will thrive in a postliterate age are the ones who keep the practice alive in themselves and pass it on: who read the whole book, write the hard draft, and raise readers, not because it is nostalgic, but because it is now a competitive advantage and has always been a human inheritance.
An astonishing wealth of wisdom has been left to us, more accessible than at any moment in history, sitting one search away. Whether it gets read, and whether anything worthy gets added to it, was never going to be decided by the crowd. It is decided by the holdouts, one evening at a time.
I know which side of that line I intend to be on. I suspect, since you made it to the end of this essay, that you do too.
Everything I argued above about writing, that the struggle of it is where the thinking happens, is not theoretical for me. My new book, Honor Under Pressure, came out of exactly that struggle: years of slow reading and slower writing on a question I could not shake. Not whether you can perform under pressure, but whether the person you become while performing is still someone worth being. If this essay resonated, I think the book will too. It asks only for the thing that has become countercultural: a few hours of your sustained attention. You can find it on Amazon, and if you read it, truly read it, I would love to hear what you think.