Monday, September 29, 2025

"What happened was the smartphone"

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. 

...

...In late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. 

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years.


What happened was the smartphone...