Monday Musing: Is Reading Really in Retreat
By Dr Samar Verma*
Are We Reading Less or Just Reading Differently?
The question landed, as many consequential questions do, not in a seminar room but over a friendly conversation: who, if anyone, still reads newspaper articles- articles by this author, even those published on this very platform? It is tempting to answer with analytics. Page views, time-on-page, scroll depth, subscriptions- good dashboards do tell a story. But they are, at best, a narrow window into a much larger landscape: they rarely capture how people actually read across a day, across devices, across languages, and across formats, nor do they reliably reveal what reading is being displaced by, and why. That small provocation- half curiosity, half unease- led me to the larger question this column examines: is reading genuinely in retreat, or are we simply reading differently?
The anxiety about reading is now a familiar cultural refrain. In universities, faculty worry that long articles go unfinished. In offices, the “two-page memo” becomes a five-slide deck. At home, even committed readers confess that the quiet hour with a book is increasingly negotiated against the glow of short videos. And now, as generative AI promises instant summaries of anything we might read, a sharper question surfaces for editors and educators alike: is reading itself in retreat- or only the forms and contexts of reading?
The evidence suggests a more unsettling, but also more precise, diagnosis. Reading is not “dead”; print is not “over”; journalism is not uniformly “unreadable.” What is changing- measurably- is who reads on a given day, how long they can stay with a text, what formats they use, and what competes for the same cognitive real estate.
The clearest signal: fewer people are reading for pleasure on an average day
If one wants hard numbers, time-use data is among the most reliable windows because it measures behaviour, not aspiration. A 2025 study using the American Time Use Survey (over 236,000 respondents across 2003–2023) finds a striking decline in leisure reading: the share of Americans reading for pleasure on an average day fell from about 28% (peak around 2004) to about 16% in 2023.
This matters because it reframes the debate. The finding is not merely that “people read fewer books,” but that reading has become less routine in daily life for a large share of the population, while those who continue to read may still read meaningfully. A decline of this kind is consistent with the lived experience of many editors: the audience becomes more polarised- some remain deeply engaged; many drift toward zero.
For children and adolescents, the trend is similarly sobering in the UK. The National Literacy Trust’s annual surveys show reading enjoyment and daily reading falling to multi-decade lows. In its 2024 report, only about a third of 8–18-year-olds said they enjoyed reading in their free time, and daily reading levels were at their lowest since the mid-2000s. By 2025, the Trust reports daily reading among 8–18-year-olds at 18.7%- roughly half the level seen two decades earlier.
This is not a minor cultural footnote. The “reading muscle” is built early; when daily reading becomes uncommon, the long-term consequences show up in comprehension, patience with complexity, and the ability to hold multiple ideas in working memory- capacities that a democracy, and a modern economy, quietly depend upon.
Newsprint is shrinking in much of the OECD- but India remains an outlier
News consumption data across OECD contexts shows an unmistakable shift away from print and toward online and platform-mediated news. Ofcom’s UK report, for example, finds that in 2024, 71% of UK adults consumed news via online sources- on par with television (70%)- while newspapers (print and online) are in long-term decline.
India, however, does not map neatly onto the OECD story. Two things can be true at once.
First, India’s news attention is demonstrably moving online at scale. The last comprehensive Indian Readership Survey series (2019) shows internet access in the “last one month” rising sharply through that year, while the share of reading newspapers in the last month declines over the same quarters. Broader media-economy signals reinforce this: the FICCI–EY assessment of India’s media and entertainment economy notes that digital media overtook television as the largest segment in 2024, and highlights the growth of short video and social media within digital advertising.
Second, print newspapers in India are not yet behaving like a sunset industry. The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported average qualifying sales of daily newspapers at about 29.74 million copies for January–June 2025- up 2.77% over the previous audit period. This does not mean print is immune to disruption; it means the centre of gravity is shifting unevenly. In India, print remains propped up by distinctive structural features: low per-copy prices, dense urban kiosks, a still-growing advertiser base in some categories, and deep linguistic segmentation where regional titles remain highly embedded in local life.
So are newspapers passé? In parts of North America and Europe, print has undeniably hollowed out. In India, the more accurate statement is: print news remains present and even profitable in pockets, but the future reader is being trained elsewhere- on feeds, video, and messaging forwards.
Books and “good literature”: resilient formats, changing gateways
If journalism is said to be “not readable,” literature “rarely read,” the evidence again asks for nuance. Surveys suggest that book reading, as a yearly behaviour, is more stable than daily leisure reading. Pew Research, for instance, has found that roughly three-quarters of US adults reported reading a book in the past year, with that overall share remaining broadly stable over a decade, and print continuing to dominate formats.
Publishing data also complicates any obituary for books. The UK Publishers Association reported strong recent growth driven by fiction and audiobooks: audiobook revenue reached a record £268 million in 2024 (up 31% year-on-year), while print still accounted for the bulk of consumer revenue. The implication is not that “people stopped reading,” but that they increasingly sequence reading through multiple modes: print for immersion, audio for commuting and chores, and digital for convenience.
The bigger change is the gateway. Discovery used to be mediated by bookstores, libraries, school lists, and newspaper reviews. Now discovery is frequently platform-driven- an algorithmic recommendation, a short clip, a creator’s list, an “aesthetic” shelf on social media. The market for books can remain robust even as sustained, unbroken reading time becomes scarcer.
Attention spans: what is actually declining is the conditions for attention
The popular claim that “attention spans have collapsed” is often overstated, but there is credible evidence that the modern environment is systematically hostile to sustained concentration. Consider PISA’s 2022 findings on distraction: across participating systems, substantial shares of students reported being distracted by digital devices in class and feeling anxious without their phones nearby. These are not abstract worries; they describe an attentional ecology in which reading competes not only with entertainment, but with socially reinforced interruption.
The story, then, is less about an inherent inability to read and more about an economy of attention where interruption is normalised, multitasking is rewarded, and the “friction” required to enter deep reading feels unusually high. In that sense, the decline in reading is not simply a preference shift; it is also a design outcome of devices, workplaces, and media incentives.
What happens when AI becomes the default layer between us and text?
AI will not eliminate reading; it will change what counts as reading. In one direction, it can democratise access: summarising dense material, translating across languages, explaining jargon, and helping first-generation learners enter texts that were previously forbidding. In another direction, it can institutionalise intellectual outsourcing: the summary replaces the argument; the digest replaces the essay; the citation replaces the source.
The likely future is a two-tier reading culture. One tier consumes “text as output”- summaries, explainers, curated key points. The other insists on “text as encounter”- the slow, sometimes uncomfortable engagement with an author’s full reasoning. Newspapers and universities will need to decide which tier they want to serve, and how consciously.
The most defensible conclusion from the evidence is this: reading is not dying, but it is becoming less habitual, more format-fragmented, and more unevenly distributed across society. India’s print resilience buys time- but not immunity. If we want a future where journalism is readable, and literature is read, the answer is not nostalgia; it is rebuilding the conditions for attention- through schools, libraries, editorial strategy, and a cultural re-legitimisation of quiet. In the age of AI, that quiet may become not a lifestyle choice, but a civic skill.
*Samar Verma, PhD, is a senior economist, public policy professional and an institution-builder, with 28 years of experience in economic policy research, international development, grant management, and philanthropic leadership. Views are personal.
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
