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It shouldn’t feel impossible to finish a book

Screens have atrophied our reading muscles. Here’s how to get them back.

A horror story of sorts is unfolding in the United States. It goes like this: AI has made it so effortless to access information, and short-form video has made it so easy to entertain ourselves, that nobody reads anymore.

If you’re familiar with this tale, it’s possible, ironically, that you read about it. A viral Atlantic story from earlier this summer put a chilling headline on trend: “The End of Reading Is Here.” Teachers and professors, the magazine reported, don’t even bother assigning entire books to their students, because excerpts are good enough to prepare for standardized texts. The piece said we’re living in a “postliterate era.”

A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes.

This is a cultural crisis, yes — but for a lot of us, it’s a personal one. We’re all short on time, and we’d like to read more, but the ascendancy of attention-stealing tech companies has made it feel like we have less of it.

How to rebuild your broken attention span

“Reading was and is a crime of opportunity,” said Leah Price, a professor of modern book history at Oxford and the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. “The limiting factor isn’t reading matter, but reading time.”

Reading is changing, not dying. The bigger problem is competition for people’s time and attention.

Print offers productive difficulty. E-readers and audiobooks make reading easier, but the friction of print promotes deeper comprehension.

Leisure reading should be fun! It’s totally fine to peek at the ending, skip boring parts, or just give up on boring books.

Losing the reading habit is especially bad because it’s a healthy practice in a world obsessed with self-improvement. Studies suggest that reading is an astonishingly good mental exercise, as well as a very accessible one. Reading, especially leisure reading, can improve your language skills. It exposes you to new knowledge and ideas. Reading can help relieve stress, anxiety, and insomnia. It can make you more empathetic and combat cognitive decline. Reading is absolutely great for kids. Reading, perhaps above all, also happens to be fun.

There are, I’m happy to say, some bright spots in this story — and some helpful news.

There’s evidence that reading isn’t over. It’s just changing. A 2025 Pew study found that the number of Americans who say they read books has remained roughly the same in recent years, although the way that they read them is changing. The vast majority of books read in the United States are print, but a growing number of people are reading e-books and listening to audiobooks. The number of print books sold is actually growing on the backs of the science fiction and self-help genres. The number of e-books and audiobooks borrowed from their local libraries, meanwhile, topped 820 million last year, a new record. There’s no shortage of books to read. And it’s never been easier to access any book you want in your preferred format.

The other bit of good news is useful to you: Reading is like a muscle. Even if you feel like your ability to pore over a book has atrophied, that muscle is still there, ready for exercise. The more you do read, the more your vocabulary improves, the more you learn, and the more........

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