""I thought that piece in the Atlantic made some good points, but the idea that reading has finished and we have moved into a kind of post-literate dark age strikes me as absurd,” Robert Darnton, a historian of the book and a former director of the Harvard University Library, told me. “ I have a little collection of jeremiads, and one is from 1928, when Walter Benjamin said, ‘Everything indicates that the book is nearing its end.’ ” He added, “There’s this unprecedented change in the technology of reading, and people are naturally reacting to that, because it’s disorienting. How do we make sense of changes that have hit us so fast?” “Every decade, there is a new scapegoat for why the reading public is diminishing,” Nancy Bass Wyden, who owns the Strand Book Store, told me. “The fact of the matter is that books are one of our most enduring forms of human expression.”
The illusion of decline might come in part because people consume books differently. Pew reported that, in 2025, the number of adults who read a print book during the year was eight percentage points less than it was in 2011—but that the number who read an e-book and the number who listened to an audiobook each increased
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When I brought up the subject of reading decline one day with Daunt, he laughed. “Such nonsense,” he said. “It’s ‘Policemen always get younger’—we just go through an arc of life. Every single year of my bookselling life, somebody has popped up and said, ‘Literary fiction is dead!’ Now it’s ‘Nobody is reading nonfiction!’ ” His stores suggested the opposite. One of Barnes & Noble’s pandemic best-sellers had been “Middlemarch,” bought largely by people younger than forty-five. At all six stores in New York this summer, one of the top-selling books—helped along by Hollywood—was Emily Wilson’s twelve-thousand-one-hundred-and-ten-line verse translation of the Odyssey."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/10/26/james-daunt-profile
