As “nobody reads books anymore” articles go, “The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch (The Atlantic, August 2026 ) is pretty solid. It hits the right notes, it offers alarming insights (college students now see required books as “professors … arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium”), and it is itself reassuringly long in a way that demonstrates the value of a good, long-form essay.
Horowitch covers familiar bases, writing:
“The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude.”
Where this essay is lacking — as with most of these “reading is dying” essays— is in looking for solutions to this problem. She quotes a Harvard University comparative literature professor who fears that “a return to text, away from video, seems awfully unlikely.”
But she doesn’t ask the obvious question: how many books does he assign to his students? If students complain about “having to read a book,” is he there to say “no, you GET TO read this book.” During the time I worked at Kenyon College a dozen or so years ago, I found time to take a class. The opportunity to be in that classroom, discussing books under the leadership of an engaged professor was amazing, one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. It’s a privilege, it’s a joy to read books in school. Why are we allowing students to think of it as a burden?
If students think that assigning a book is about withholding information, the answer can’t be to stop requiring books, it has to be requiring more. If, as Horowitch writes, reading in public is now seen as “performative,” then the answer has to be more book reading in public, not less.
In Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate, Tuppence Beresford says:
“I read at five years old. Everyone could, when I was young. I didn’t know one even had to sort of learn. I mean somebody would read stories around, and you like them very much and you remembered where the book went back on the shelf and you were always allowed to take it out and have a look at it yourself, and so you found you were reading it too.”
It’s obviously not quite that simple: learning to read isn’t exactly automatic. But at the same time, maybe you can argue that it is that simple. Modeling reading and providing access to books can get us much of the way towards where we want to be. Excellent organizations provide books to young readers. Is it time to ask whether there are sufficient forces out there providing access to books for grown-ups?
Horowitch writes that “last year, print-book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. Barnes & Noble opened more than 60 new stores. Almost 400 independent bookstores sprang up in 2025.” It’s also lovely to hear that the number of Little Free Libraries has exploded, doubling to 200,000 since 2020. (Jennie and I are part of this growth, and we enjoy seeing how books circulate through our little library.)
So maybe we don’t need to be quite so gloomy, even as the forces of digitization are mighty and omnipresent. They’ve worked tirelessly to remove physical books from our presence. They haven’t succeeded. Yet. Ebooks and audiobooks may be sensible choices for many situations. But no reputable source disputes the idea that students learn better from printed text on paper, so why push digital in school? And why aren’t we all more worried about how digital platforms are mediating our access to text? There has never been a more democratizing force than the physical book. In contrast, it seems to me, digital platforms are increasingly autocratic.
If we are true book lovers, isn’t it incumbent upon us to wave that flag in public? To bring real books to doctors’ waiting rooms, on airplanes and everywhere else? In the era of the mass-market paperback, the book industry believed in the idea that books could be everywhere. That’s why the format was called mass-market, and why mass market books were designed to be so portable. Books were like that Coca-Cola business model: a Coke within arm’s reach of everyone on the planet. Today, we are told, the mass market paperback is dead.
Maybe that’s where we come in. Horowitch’s article is most useful in describing how books and reading are being reframed: books are about withholding information, only a narrow subculture reads text, reading in public is performative, etc. So let’s reframe how we think about reading. Reading is still about learning and pleasure and understanding, but maybe we can think about reading as resistance. We are still reading for all the reasons that we always have, but now it’s a choice that signals how we are reclaiming ourselves from the nightmare of an all-digital future.