What Do Booksellers Make Of “The End Of Reading”?

If you haven’t yet encountered the cover story for the August issue of The Atlantic, I have some bad news to share: “The End of Reading Is Here.” It’s an intentionally provocative headline for a slightly less provocative story; while it may portend doom, Rose Horowitch’s piece makes a smaller claim than its headline. She speaks more of a “decline of reading,” and, in a nod to Marshall McLuhan, argues that the U.S. is “postliterate.” Certainly there are crises well-covered within the piece that represent real challenges to readers today: attacks on our capacity for attention, metrics that show marked declines in reading comprehension, the impacts of generative AI on readers and reading, and more.

But The Atlantic’s framing places it firmly in a tradition with which the still-existing reading public is all too familiar: the piece proclaiming the demise of books and reading, and the devastating effects of that demise for the world we live in. The writer Trevor Aleo identified this trend in his response to Horowitch, calling her entry “the Platonic form of pearl-clutching clickbait about the decline of reading.” A smattering of her predecessors, all from the last couple of years, include Tyler Cowen proclaiming “Goodbye to the Age of the Book” at The Free Press; James Marriott declaring “The dawn of the post-literate society” in a viral piece on his Substack (Marriott is also about to release a book on the topic: The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society); and Beth McMurtrie with “Is This the End of Reading?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Horowitch herself has been productive in the past writing in similar veins, with pieces like “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Many of these pieces engage with real issues, but tend to use those issues to advance a doom narrative that both flatters the reader for being one of the few people left who can follow an argument at length, and presents the situation as essentially beyond hope.

There’s much that can and should be said about this onslaught of post-literate panic, but it’s also worth noting who is and isn’t being asked to contribute to the conversation. Notably absent from these essays is one group of people who might have real insight into the situation: booksellers. The prognosticators wring their hands over the demise of reading, but ignore those whose very livelihood depends on the selling of books. Perhaps they might have something to say on the subject.