Are we moving towards the end of reading?

Reading today is different than it was 15 or 20 years ago. The publishing sector has weathered the digital transformation better than any other cultural industry. But the increased availability of entertainment and information, along with technological innovations — recently joined by the emergence of artificial intelligence — have generated profound changes that have sparked intense debate in recent months, especially in English-language media. The Spanish version of the discussion was sparked by the controversy surrounding influencer María Pombo’s remarks about the benefits, or otherwise, of reading: her statements may not have made us read more or less, but they have inspired many passionate columns.

For some people, as Joshua Rothman recounts in a recent essay in The New Yorker, the smartphone makes the dream of carrying a library in their pocket possible; for many others, it offers access to more engaging and accessible forms of entertainment or information. Between 2003 and 2023, the population of people in the United States who read for fun fell by 40%, according to a study published in the scientific journal iScience. Disparities based on race, education, and income have widened over time. The National Endowment for the Arts, a U.S. government agency that funds cultural projects, reported in 2023 that the proportion of adults in the United States who read a book a year had fallen from 55% to 48% in a decade. The number of 13-year-olds who read for fun almost every day had fallen, in the same time, from 27% to 14%. In the United Kingdom, a survey by the National Literacy Trust, an independent cultural organization, indicated a 26% drop in the number of children reading every day in their free time since 2005. The signs are not the same everywhere: in Spain, the Spanish Federation of Publishers’ Guilds barometer indicates a 5.8% increase in the number of people reading for leisure since 2017, although it seems difficult to escape the trends marking the English-speaking world.

When children are asked about screen addiction, it’s not uncommon for them to point out the contradiction of their parents being glued to their cell phones. We’re obsessed with screens; but there are also people who want to get away from them and their distractions, and they look for habits and tricks that make it easier: from book clubs to phones with fewer features, to leaving the device in another room, or hiding it somewhere. Some point out that it is not so clear that there is always much to regret: if instead of reading bad books some people watch bad TV series, what does it matter?

Others add to the debate the cultural decline of literary fiction. In addition to the screen hypothesis, in the United States, Jacob Savage wrote a controversial article a few months ago: The Vanishing White Male Writer. Among the data he cited was that no white American male born after 1984 has been published in the legendary The New Yorker magazine. None of the 25 nominees for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award for debut fiction were white males; nor were any of the 70 nominees for the Center for Fiction’s first novel award. Several reasons can be cited: literary and commercial trends, the elite substitution effect, the correction of a historical injustice and the desire to hear the voices of unheard groups, the difficulty of finding interesting authors, and even the incentive to try one’s luck in other fields; all of these surely influence the outcome.

But the decline in the influence and commercial clout of literary fiction, or the loss of importance of magazines, argues blogger Owen Yingling, for example, is broader and not limited to white men. He suggests that it’s not just explained by screens or the catch-all category of wokeism: it’s something deeper. “The 21st century collapse in American literary fiction’s cultural impact, measured by commercial sales and the capacity to produce well-known great writers, stems less from identity politics or smartphones than from a combined supply shock (the shrinking magazine or academia pipeline) and demand shock (the move away from writing books that appeal to normal readers in order to seek prestige inside the world of lit-fiction),” he writes in his newsletter.

Comparing the Publishers Weekly bestseller lists of the 1960s (featuring works by Mary McCarthy, J. D. Salinger, and John O’Hara, or Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint as a 1969 bestseller) with those of later times (where the last “literary” work to make the top 10 was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections) might depress Pangloss. But, as so often, we risk considering what we know or yearn for to be better than it actually was, and the circumstances of a particular era to be the natural state of things. And the problem is not limited to literary fiction.

Now, as reactions to screens proliferate, artificial intelligence is also causing concern. Some studies point to possible negative effects: “Just as relying on a GPS dulls our sense of direction, relying on AI for writing and reasoning can dull those skills,” notes a report by MIT researchers. Its arrival and its obvious advantages for writing or summarizing texts would reinforce the idea, formulated in various ways in recent decades, of the end of The Gutenberg Galaxy and the return, with the internet, to a culture that more closely resembles oral culture — a “secondary orality,” in the words of language philosopher Wayne Ong. Writing enabled an intellectual revolution because it lightens the cognitive effort of memory and allows for the development of precise and complex expressions, as well as logical reasoning. Ong and his followers pointed out the risk of recovering some of the limitations suffered by pre-writing societies.

Economist Tyler Cowen says he already writes with AI in mind: those readers who might not even read you, but who won’t forget you, and who will be able to retrieve your words and your best ideas from an always-available repository. Others say they read while simultaneously asking a chatbot questions. The interlocutor is a bit of a dolt, but has a wealth of information and never loses patience. You can ask for translations, summarized versions, or rewrites in simpler language. AI, Joshua Rothman points out, can also change our idea of text production: sampling seemed strange a few years ago, and now it’s a staple in music. We may no longer have “sacred texts” and move on to a large Reader’s Digest. On the one hand, this reminds us that summaries, variants, and paraphrases have always existed. On the other, it creates a devilish problem in terms of copyright, and could disrupt the idea of the finished work we relate to as readers and that the author dreams of completing. But there will always be those who will continue to do something as disconcerting and free as reading for fun.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition