According to America’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, there has been a long-term decline in the number of 13-year-olds reading for fun. In 2023, 14% reported doing so almost every day compared to the 27% recorded in 2012. Meanwhile, in the UK a study for the Reading Agency found that half of adults do not regularly read for pleasure — a total composed of 15% who never did and, more ominously, 35% who used to.

Or you can just look around the next time you’re on a train. How many of your fellow passengers are reading a book? Many fewer than in previous decades, despite the greatly reduced competition from newspapers.

The obvious explanation is the smartphone, and everything it plugs us into. It’s not that we don’t read anything anymore — in fact, we live in a world of continuous textual availability. However, this is the written word in fragments, bound up with broken images. As an informational landscape, it bears no relation to where we were a generation ago.

So it’s no surprise students struggle with books. In the absence of a home or school environment that consciously provides a refuge from the distraction economy, why would we expect anything different? The retreat of book-reading clearly matters in academia: studying a novel from an extract is like trying to understand a painting from a jigsaw piece. But this also applies to the rest of us. Despite all the new ways we can be enriched, informed and entertained, we still need books as much as we used to. That’s because a great novel is about as close as you can get to stepping out of your consciousness and into someone else’s — and, for that matter, doing so in detail and for an extended period of time. Reading gets you over yourself — or at least beyond yourself. The mental health and wellbeing advantages of that should be obvious.

In addressing online harms, we usually focus on what the internet exposes its users to, like the dark side of social media or addictive pornography. Yet the potential damage to individuals doesn’t just lie in the formation of new and sickly habits, but also in the displacement of old and healthy ones.

There is almost no activity with which social media is in greater competition than reading. Almost every moment we spend scrolling on our screens is a moment we could have spent with a book. As inheritors of a civilisation built on books, the cost may be greater than we think.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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