What's happening to reading?
216 comments
·July 13, 2025smeej
I'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new.
I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.
I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work.
Reading is so difficult as to be a chore for the average person. They don't just see written words and know what they say. They really have to work to get meaning out of written text.
With the proliferation of other means of taking in information, many of which require no effort of any kind beyond hitting play and staying within earshot, why would people choose to read? They didn't want to do it before. And now they don't need to do it either.
jraph
> walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words
Of course.
I would likely find this situation very unsettling, if not stressful. I would probably be caught off guard. I would probably perform badly if I accept at all for all sorts of reasons unrelated to my ability to read smoothly. Unless I'm feeling particularly positive and gather the energy to pace my mind, apply myself, enter a character like I'm having a role in a play, and remember to be slow, and to forget about the content. Reading out loud is more complicated than simply reading for yourself: you are, at the same time, both reading and articulating speech.
What's more, when you speak, you are using your own words, your own (oral) phrasing, and you know where you are going, or at least enough to have a decent prosody. When you read out loud, you are reading phrasing from someone else, which may make the prosody less smooth. And if you haven't read the whole sentence in advance, or at least ahead enough, you may struggle.
Independently of knowing how to read (fast), reading out loud probably takes practice to be smooth.
With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.
Parsing a text also depends on the writer's ability to write well. If the text is boring or its phrasing is overly complicated, yeah, it will be difficult to read.
We also live in a world plagued by focus disruptions. You are not only dealing with people's ability to read, but also their ability to remain focused… in a setting where they possibly get interrupted very frequently.
For all sorts of reasons, reading a wall of text is indeed hard. This includes the reader's environment, the presence of their smartphone next to them, how tired they are, whether they are concerned by something else, whether the text is actually interesting to them, and how well the author of the text writes.
kixiQu
> With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.
Even "caught off guard", not "feeling particularly positive", and "reading phrasing from someone else", some people have so fundamentally mastered reading as a skill that this wouldn't be difficult for them even if the challenge were attempted drunk. The point of the parent comment was, I believe, that for such people it may be hard to imagine that others would believe "reading a wall of text is indeed hard" because it isn't for them.
rizzom5000
I believe you, and this has been know for decades. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755
The underlying truth here is worse than 'majority of educated are illiterate'. Collectively, we've built these delusions into our culture. Perhaps there is less suffering this way.
hellisothers
> Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words
Is this tru’ish? I’m not refuting it I’m just a little shocked this might be the situation we’re in. I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?
bombcar
It’s probably true insofar as if random assholes accost me and ask to read a page from a book I’m more likely to employ old Anglo Saxon than engage with their stupidity.
watwut
A weirdo approaches you with a highly unusual request. You suspect the goal is to humiliate you or make you into a dummy somehow, which is actually their goal. No thanks.
> I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?
There is reading and then there is reading an unknown text out loud in public while being judged. The two are not the same thing. I had to read publicly when I was a student years ago when smartphones were a new thing. They handed me the text with instructions to reread it at least twice ideally out loud before performing.
The point is, it is not like 20 years ago a good student would be expected to read super fluidly out loud in public without at least a little preparation.
null
mvdtnz
I think that you're greatly overstating the point.
> But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you.
I doubt that you have done this, but if you have please stop doing it. This is literal insane behaviour.
photonthug
I don't know. Talking with strangers is always kind of insane, or at least a pretty illogical leap of faith, because there's not much chance that the interaction is interesting or amusing. Now a stranger that walks up to me and demands some dramatic reading of Paradise Lost, stat? Ok, I'm intrigued, hold my beer and buckle up while I let you hear about regions of sorrow and darkness visible because the produce section has never seen some shit like this
KittenInABox
I don't want to correlate the ability to read aloud to a stranger about the same as parsing. It's possible to read and not parse what you're saying (that's what teleprompters are for) and its possible to parse and not speak. Do we have formal studies for comprehension?
StefanBatory
... if I was asked by a stranger to read a page of book for them out of blue in a store, I'd be staring dumbfounded, questioning whether everything's alright with them.
asimpletune
Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril.
On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.
Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what they’re talking about, which just goes to show that people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.
beloch
Click-bait longform is where things went wrong.
I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.
Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.
When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.
barrkel
And it's the New Yorker that is frequently a culprit here. Too many articles talking about the journey the reporter went on to write their article. The low signal to noise ratio is a decent chunk of the reason I unsubscribed. Too few articles paid off.
kristjansson
They have a convention of prefacing articles with a category from their own taxonomy (“Personal History”, “Shouts and Mumurs”, “Reporter at Large”, “Talk of the town”, etc.) that signify the sort of article you’re going to get. In print this works well, as the heading is prominent, and the each type occurs in a somewhat fixed order in the magazine, so you have a few clues you might be reading a type you dislike. I worry this hasn’t translated well to their online readership, and has contributed to a poorer reputation than they deserve.
SoftTalker
Any good sources for longform articles?
nemomarx
Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to summarize them?
beloch
Click-bait. I'm not immune. I see something tantalizing and then I have to know. I've been burned by Hacker News more than once.
timeinput
I mean I read the New Yorker OP article because it was posted on hacker news, and highly voted. It was probably too short to be considered long form, but I feel like I was baited into reading a rambling article where I gained nothing of value other than at best a summary of other peoples thoughts, where the only conclusion I can practically draw with out reading a lot more is "Joshua Rothman and others don't like how people are consuming content".
compacct27
Another part of what happened is that the comment section feels more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful outcome.
Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance, crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-knowledge
yannyu
It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to.
"Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field.
How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential comment about some piece of media that you've never even seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes are completely intelligible across the internet even though many people have never actually seen them.
I think the argument of the person that you're responding to is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and consume them.
The assumption that long form content is a relic and that reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour, then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is all you need to be an expert in something.
bumby
I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading, but misses that reading (as a process, a verb) can be the goal in itself, at least in terms of recreational reading. Summarization misses all that experience, just like reading the synopsis of a movie isn’t the same as viewing the art. I don’t want everything in my life to be just a rush to the ends, anymore than I’d want to trade the human experience of hugging my child to be reduced to simply understanding “an increase in reading oxytocin creates bonding leading to higher resource investment and survivability.”
A rush to “get to the point” when dealing with art feels very much like the tech-obsessed productivity porn that can miss the forest for the trees.
KineticLensman
> I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading
Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through. Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a subsequent level, and then exploring how they achieve those effects is where a literary-level read starts.
ThrowawayR2
> "It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along."
A passage from E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" springs immediately to mind.
"... 'Beware of first-hand ideas!' exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. 'First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free From taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.'
Tremendous applause greeted this lecture, which did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men ..."
Or perhaps what Terry Pratchett wrote about the river Ankh may apply: "Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed." One has to wonder if people are thinking "Any idea that has passed through so many layers of minds has to be thoroughly refined indeed."
asimpletune
I mean, the insurmountable problem is - and will always be - that true knowledge lies beyond words. You can communicate and articulate and pontificate and these are all good things, but even at their best efforts they will never be more than a mechanical process that will never quite get you there. In other words, there will never be the right words to “get it” because what there is to get is fundamentally unexplainable.
It’s like trying to explain what one may see hear or feel when their on vacation at an exotic new location by talking about the train tracks that brought you there.
So when you’re reading you’re not downloading packets that add up to some kind of point. Instead, in the absolute best case scenario, you’re simulating the experience, according to the author’s recommended doses, of someone else “acquiring” knowledge. This “someone else” is the nameless reader the book was written for but they are not you.
staunton
Objections:
- it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise.
- It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is applying the knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity of reading.
- One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young, but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.
prerok
Well, education researchers are trying to communicate that knowledge is never "transferred".
IIRC (I don't recall where I read about this), there are two problems:
1. "transfer" gives the impression that a person can copy their knowledge to another person, but that is not the case. The teacher says, writes the words or even demonstrates, but the brain in the student is making its own connections and tries to explain it in its own frame of reference. It may click, or may not, or may even click in the wrong way, leading to learning a different lesson from the one being taught.
2. The teacher may have tacit knowledge they do not know they have to teach, or convey by some other means. Most teachers don't even realize that this tacit knowledge is not present in their students.
So, maybe nitpicking a bit, but "transfer" is not the right word for it.
SoftTalker
The pace of advancement in human civilization, expecially in science and technology (and all the conveniences and economic multipliers that have resulted) was very slow until literacy became widespread.
Before most people could read, you would learn a trade from your father or as an apprentice. Knowledge was handed down but you pretty much learned "the way it has always been done" and improvements were slow.
Once we all could learn from books and publish our discoveries, the spread of knowledge and the pace of advancement exploded. We went from farming with animal labor to walking on the moon in under a century.
HellDunkel
A great perspective but one problem remains: AI will radically change the book market. Great new books will be even harder to find as we are drowning in a sea of words. How do we stay afloat?
chickensong
Seek out book enthusiasts, which in some ways (tools, internet), is easier than ever, and find your tribe(s) that align with your taste. AI or not, the volume of books is ever increasing. Word of mouth, personal recommendations, curated lists, all are only increasing in value.
SoftTalker
There are more great books written before 2022 than a person could read in a lifetime. Stick with those.
YinglingHeavy
Reddit is trivia porn
tines
I had this exact thought the other day. Social media is information porn. Endless amounts of empty information that gives you the feeling of acquiring knowledge, with none of the substance.
kridsdale1
I feel this way about The News.
SoftTalker
And also real porn.
xorvoid
For many people, paywalls may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.
roadside_picnic
Interestingly enough Claude has me reading much more. Especially with math books, one of the greatest challenges to self-study can be making sure you are in fact getting the concepts correct. Without this it's easy to get fairly deep into a book only to give up once you realize you haven't quite built the picture in your head right. Often you do get it, but it takes multiple re-reads/alternate views of the problem.
With Claude as I read I can constantly check my understanding. When my response elicits a "Well, not exactly..." I know I have to go back. This combined with the ability to have Claude clarify formula details from a phone picture has rapidly accelerated my learning and has me reading much more these days.
Claude is also pretty good at subject specific recommendations, especially when you're looking for a specific type of treatment of a subject.
shiandow
What's happening to reading? Followed by several popups that unaccountably take ages to make themselves known and prevent me from reading the damn article.
Not the point they wanted to make, but a point nonetheless.
interestica
I saw an example recently of a sort of “AI Codec” : A person has to send a message to a respected figure of authority. They organize their thoughts and requests into a clear and concise bulleted list with explanations. But, that seemed heavily informal and unprofessional. So they used AI to convert the bullets to paragraphs and sent it out.
The authority received the large body of text but, due to time commitments and attention, they didn’t have time to read it all. They used AI to convert the text to a concise bulleted list.
Animats
From the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain, I had to buy a special lamp, and a magnifying glass on a stand."
And get off my lawn.
Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.
SamBam
> Actually, young people are writing more.
Is this a feeling, or something you know from statistics?
Many of the teens I know (I'm a teacher) aren't writing blog posts, or even comments on Reddit. They're watching YouTube videos and not interacting back with anything more than a thumbs up.
Sure, some are writing on anime subreddits or whatever, but I don't want to make generalizations for what teens are doing across the US or the rest of the Western world without some kind of statistics.
kridsdale1
They’re writing in iMessage, Instagram, and ChatGPT.
fishpen0
But not in paragraphs. Their written language in those forums is short form sentences that are a mix of emojis and almost randomly inserted words that are more akin to honorifics sprinkled in to convey tone "no cap" "frfr"
Analemma_
> Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.
I'm not convinced this is providing any value in the way you're implying. When people talk about the cognitive benefits of writing, what they mean is writing which makes you organize your thoughts, and notice when they are messy and disjointed. I think a majority of the writing people do online is not of that form: instead it takes the form of emotional outbursts which essentially go directly from the amygdala to the fingers and barely involve the higher brain functions at all, much less trigger the kind of introspection and reflection that people mean when they say writing is good for you.
In other words, just as not all reading is equally valuable, I don't think all writing is either and I think almost all Internet writing is of the low-value kind.
d0odk
The article has several paragraphs addressing these points...
NoMoreNicksLeft
> Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.
If they could be called paragraphs, that is. A more accurate description might be a random sample of phrases that spontaneously popped into their heads, only loosely relevant to each other in the broadest possible sense, minus anything like grammar, punctuation, or even non-mediocre word choice.
pessimizer
People are so much more literate than they were even a short time ago. Having to type in order to participate on the internet and the Harry Potter phenomenon both seriously upgraded world literacy in general.
edit:
> [...]the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent.
Also, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read 10-50K words on the internet daily but don't consider it reading shot up to 100%
Loughla
Are 13 year olds reading on the Internet though? My experience working with the youth is that they consume video, not written material
coliveira
You have no idea what teens are doing, it is mostly video all day long.
SamBam
Evidence?
throwmeaway222
Promise of AI: All text will be generated
Result: No text will be read by anyone except AI
kevindamm
Will the small web still survive?
kridsdale1
As long as there are dorks obsessed with mini painting, trains, odd fish, old knitting patterns, there will be communities and blogs for them.
null
whycome
> These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration
Has this been solved? In a low friction way with good UX. I’m surprised that with Amazon owning Audible there’s not a more streamlined option to switch between an ebook and the audio version.
rpdillon
This has been a thing for years. I've used it dozens of times.
PaulHoule
Six months ago there seemed to be a flood of people who wanted to normalize Dyslexia and were pitching startups that the 75% of people who can read just didn't need because... they can read.
Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.
genewitch
there was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era, also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something, can hardly remember.
I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.
kqr
> I have no idea how it worked.
I traced down this through an academic article which favourably compared it to other summarising solutions back in 2006. It might help answer the question: https://web.archive.org/web/20070209101837/http://www.copern...
PaulHoule
For me chat with a paragraph in a language I sorta know (Japanese) or wish I knew (Chinese) is really useful. I ask for a translation and see discordances with what I can read and ask about them and get good answers. I also can lean on translations from my text and insist that certain words get used, etc.
vjvjvjvjghv
They also had Copernic desktop search which was really good until they enshittified it slowly.
genewitch
thankfully "everything.exe" is everything i need. not affiliated, it's just really nice on windows. On linux, mlocate and the like are fine, although i find myself doing a `find / -name foo` most often. I don't use Mac, but i have an understanding that spotlight/sherlock or whatever isn't as good as it was in the past.
Someday i'll actually put all my documents into a document database so i can search stuff inside the documents. Did Copernic desktop search do that? Windows ~98 could; it was real slow back then. I have so many "documents" that even if windows still allows searching within files (it probably does) i reckon it'd kill my hard drives eventually.
sw030695
"There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop."
Ironically straight after reading this was an inline video advertisement, and this page crashes constantly (2.6 GB memory usage for an article?)
ainiriand
Kind of off topic but what browser are you using?
https://archive.ph/95Zyw