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Naomi S. Baron
Most writing is done in anticipation of an external readership. Excepting the stuff of bureaucratic recordkeeping or private diaries, authors routinely seek audiences for their work. The same was true of Elizabethan poets as of today’s indie self‐publishers. What has changed is the coming of computers and the Internet. How are digital technologies shaping reader practices and, derivatively, what and how authors write?
To tackle these questions, we begin with a potted history of digital reading. We then consider whether computers, eReaders, tablets, and mobile phones simply provide new “containers” for the same content appearing in print or whether the technology redefines what we do with the written word. To think through the content versus container debate, we view the problem through a series of lenses. We first address the cognitive side of reading, exploring comprehension and memory, concentration, complexity, reflection, and text length. The second dimension we consider is aesthetics and the senses of perception. Third, we focus on the pragmatic side of reading, including how stakeholders (either readers themselves or those generating texts) consider convenience, cost, and the environment in settling on a reading platform.
The digital revolution is fueling a reinvention of reading, though computer‐based technology is not the only factor at work. We close by considering how much of the shift in what it means to read may be stemming from other sources of change, and by thinking about the shape of American reading in the near future.
A Potted History of Digital Reading
The roots of eReading trace back several decades. In 1971, Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, harnessed computer technology to make freely accessible thousands of books and documents already living in the public domain – but in print. The digital enterprise, dubbed Project Gutenberg, was available via ARPANET, progenitor of the Internet.
By the 1990s, access to online material had begun to mushroom. The Internet was now a public tool, and personal computers afforded everyone with an Internet connection the ability to read – and write – online. Libraries were starting to digitize their collections, and, in 2002, Google undertook the venture that would become Google Books. Newspapers and periodicals produced digital versions of their publications. Schools and colleges increasingly asked students to use computer‐based learning management systems on which faculty posted assigned readings and students submitted written work. Until the mid‐2000s, digital reading was done overwhelmingly on desktop or laptop computers, and users could expect to encounter text of the same length and complexity found in the printed version.
That world changed with the coming of eReaders.
eReaders, eBooks, and Tablets
The first digital devices designed for reading appeared in the 1990s, with such platforms as the Apple Newton (1993) and the Rocket eBook (1999), followed in the United States by the Sony Reader (2006). But it was Amazon’s Kindle, released in late 2007, that would make “eReader” and “eBook” everyday concepts.
To launch the Kindle, Amazon offered electronic versions of print books at the uniform price of $9.99, which was usually less expensive than the original print. The eReader and eBook business took off. On Christmas Day 2009, Amazon’s sales of eBooks in the United States surpassed hardcovers. By January 2011, Kindle eBook sales moved ahead of paperbacks (Adams 2011). Nationally, eBook sales for 2011 rose 117% over 2010, following triple digit increases in 2010 and 2009 (AAP Estimates 2012; Milliot 2010; Soares 2011). By 2013, eBook sales accounted for 27% of US adult trade books (Greenfield 2014).
Competition for the eReading public came in 2010, with Apple’s new tablet computer, the iPad. Amazon countered by offering eReading devices with Internet connections. Other competitors included Barnes & Noble and Kobo. By mid‐decade, eReading had become increasingly popular in the United States. Among adults surveyed in January 2014, 28% reported having read an eBook in the past year, up from 17% in 2011 (Zickuhr and Rainie 2014).
Both eReaders and tablets come in a variety of sizes. But none is as small as a mobile phone.
The Rise of Mobile Phones
There are now over eight billion mobile phone subscriptions (International Telecommunication Union n.d.) in a world of about 7.7 billion people. While many of these phones restrict users to talking and sending text messages, the proportion of smartphones (having an Internet connection, a touch screen interface, and ability to run multiple applications) continues to grow. In 2014, 1.2 billion smartphones were sold worldwide (Gartner 2015). By 2018, 81% of adults in the United States had a smartphone (Taylor and Silver 2019). Meanwhile, sales of eReaders and tablets (not to mention laptops) have been less robust (Lindsay 2015).
Connectivity and Screen Real Estate
The original Kindle restricted users to downloading and paying for books. Over time, both eReaders and tablets increasingly came with full‐fledged Internet capability. (The same is obviously true of smartphones.) As the “digital revolution” morphs into the “mobile revolution,” portability is driving user decision making on what device to carry, and that decision is increasingly a mobile phone. However, since mobile phones come with less screen real estate than eReaders or tablets, fewer words of text are available on the screen at a time.
Later on, we shall see how both availability of the Internet and physical screen size impact the way we read digitally. To set the stage, we introduce a debate that has dominated much of the digital reading discourse: Do we function differently when reading onscreen versus in hardcopy?
The Content versus Container Debate
For proponents of digital reading, what matters is the words themselves, not the medium of transmission (O’Leary 2012). If a story is engaging, it is deemed irrelevant whether those words appear on parchment, in a first edition, on foolscap, or in a portable document format (PDF).
The content versus container discussion raises the broader question, What is a book? Most of us envision pages bound together and encased in covers, front and back. But why not a scroll, a digital volume, or an audio recording?
The audio issue is far from trivial. As far back as 1889 (just two decades after Edison’s invention of the phonograph), in his story “With the Eyes Shut,” Edward Bellamy imagined a world in which reading is largely replaced by listening on one’s “indispensable.” Today, growth of audio books is soaring (AAP StatShot 2019). When exploring how the digital revolution potentially changes our notion of what it means to read, we need to consider the impact not just of pixels but of sound waves. When the Pew Research Center asked how many people had read a book within the past year, respondents could include a print book, an eBook, or an audio book (Zickuhr and Rainie 2014).
Contemporary discussions about the relationship between content and container often center on stories (typically novels, romances, thrillers, and the like). The argument is that if we are mentally absorbed, then the medium is irrelevant. But to reduce all reading to engagement with plotline or character development oversimplifies the world of reading. Yes, sometimes we do leisure reading (commonly fiction) for sheer enjoyment, to kill time, or even to avoid interaction with others (as when cooped up on a fully loaded plane). Yet we also read to learn, to contemplate, or to reread.
When we look at reading in these latter contexts, we discover that container may indeed matter. Some considerations are cognitive. Several are aesthetic and sensory. And others are pragmatic. These findings are drawn from multiple sources, including my own research.
Since 2010, I have been gathering data on reading habits and platform preferences among university students. In addition to running several iterations of pilot studies in the United States, I used a single survey instrument to collect responses from over 400 participants in the USA, Japan, Germany, Slovakia, and India.1 The surveys contained two types of questions. In the first cluster, students selected an answer from among several choices. For instance, if the question was about rereading books, students were asked whether they reread “most of the time,” “sometimes,” “occasionally,” or “never.” Another group of questions were open‐ended, including four “like most”/“like least” queries: “What is the one thing you like most about reading in hardcopy? On a digital screen? Least about reading in hardcopy? On a digital screen?” I also gave participants the chance to add whatever other comments they wished.2
The Cognitive Side of Reading
Growth of digital devices (along with material to read on them) has generated considerable interest in the question of whether our minds work the same way when we read onscreen and in print. Research actively began in the early 1990s, when digital reading was not widespread and still largely confined to desktop machines (see Dillon 1992 for a review of that literature). Two decades later, reading onscreen has become both more common and portable.
Comprehension and Memory
Recent studies of digital reading have focused on comprehension: Is performance better on a screen or in print? Among adult readers, it is unclear at this point whether medium matters. Research projects in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Israel have all yielded comparable results on both platforms (Ackerman and Goldsmith 2011; Green et al. 2010; Holzinger et al. 2011; Kretzschmar et al. 2013). In each case, subjects were asked to read a passage and then answer questions, similar to the format of the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) pre‐college verbal test administered by the Educational Testing Service.
The Israeli study had an interesting twist. When participants were given a set amount of time to complete the reading in both conditions, comprehension levels were on par. However, when subjects were allowed to decide how long to spend reading, they took less time onscreen and had lower comprehension. Because the reading we do in everyday life (whether digital or in print) is rarely timed, this finding lends credence to the perception many people have that they read more quickly (and less mindfully) onscreen. A student in one of my studies explicitly commented that she reads more slowly (and carefully) when using print.
Reading specialist Anne Mangen brings different studies to the table, concluding that comprehension – and memory – are worse when reading onscreen. Her initial study involved tenth‐grade Norwegian students (Mangen, Walgermo, and Brønnick 2013). Because Norway is shifting school testing from print to digital PDFs accessed on computers, Mangen was concerned that scores would decline with online testing, thereby underestimating students’ knowledge.
Mangen suggests that when reading continuous text onscreen, it is difficult to construct a mental map of the whole. If you need to return to a section you previously read, it’s hard to navigate spatially. Navigation on paper is simpler. In my own studies, one US participant said she likes the fact that with print she can “easily go back to something I’d already read.” A Japanese student observed that when reading onscreen, “it’s not easy to locate where I was.”
More recently, Mangen has been studying adult reading, comparing reading a short story on a Kindle versus in print (Mangen, Olivier, and Velay 2019). While basic comprehension was similar in both media, participants were better able to identify where and when in the story events took place when reading with print. Other research (Singer and Alexander 2017) has shown that while comprehension for the main idea in a reading passage is equivalent both in print and onscreen, identification of more detailed key points is better in print. An extensive meta‐analysis of studies comparing comprehension in print versus digital concluded that, overall, reading in print led to better comprehension (Delgado et al. 2018).
A different take on comprehension and memory comes from work by psychologist Betsy Sparrow and her colleagues (Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner 2011). Sparrow studied the process of doing Internet searches, looking at whether people were more likely to remember the content of the result or the search path leading to it. The answer: the search path. As more and more reading takes place on a platform optimized for searching, the question becomes, How much do we concentrate on the substance of what we are reading?
Concentration
The literary critic Harold Bloom contends that “We live in an age of visual overstimulation,” where the pernicious screen “destroy[s] the ability to read well” (D’Addario 2015). To “read well” assumes concentrating on the text. However, data strongly suggest that concentration is more difficult when reading onscreen than in print.
In my studies, 92% of all participants (including 92% in the USA) said it was easier to concentrate with print. When I asked what they liked least about reading on digital screens, 43% in the US sample mentioned distraction. Such distraction overwhelmingly stems from the fact that on most digital devices, an Internet connection tempts readers to stray from the text at hand. Technology writer (and eBook aficionado) Hugh McGuire acknowledges the challenge: “I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters […] It just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without something else happening” (McGuire 2015). By “something else happening,” McGuire is presumably alluding to the fact that when using a digital device with an Internet connection, people have grown accustomed to the ping announcing a new email or text message, or the opportunity to check Instagram or do a Facebook status update. One college student – himself an avid reader of print – shared with me his increased difficulty in concentrating on printed text because he finds himself waiting for something to happen, something of the sort familiar when reading onscreen. Similarly, Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, observed that in the age of Google and onscreen activity, focusing on what he is reading is now more challenging: “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy […] Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do […] The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle” (Carr 2008).
In spring 2015, Microsoft Canada issued a report on people’s shortening attention span (Gausby 2015). While in 2000 the average human attention span was estimated to be 12 seconds, by 2013 that number had shrunk to 8 seconds. Among the Canadians that Microsoft surveyed, 19% of online viewers reported moving on to something else in the first 10 seconds.
Complexity
Beyond the importance of concentrating while reading is the issue of the text’s complexity. Even assuming readers are willing to move through the paragraphs, can they follow an argument? Can they connect pieces of the storyline appearing in different parts of the book? Can they make sense of difficult concepts? And are these tasks more problematic when reading onscreen than in hardcopy?
The classicist Eric Havelock had argued that the emergence of alphabetic writing in Attic Greece promoted the logical style of thinking we associate with classical Greek philosophy (Havelock 1963). Historian Elizabeth Eisenstein pursued a related argument in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), exploring how print both generated new content and shaped our mental approaches to the written word, including the ability to compare arguments, now that people could view multiple books simultaneously.
With the explosion of digital screens, some contemporary authors are concerned that readers no longer have the patience for dealing with textual complexity. German fiction writer Katharina Hacker worries that authors’ “writing and thinking is being marginalized” because onscreen readers have trouble concentrating on long, involved texts (Hawley 2013). British novelist Fay Weldon writes that eReading calls for a less complicated form of writing:
a different kind of reader needs a new kind of writer who is prepared to […] write two versions of the same novel – one with the features of the literary novel (that is, written in contemplative mode with a strong authorial presence and inclined to discuss social and political issues or give advice as to the nature of humanity) and another shorter, easier version (a page‐turner, plot‐heavy and character‐rich) which troubles no‐one with too much thought.
She continues:
I can read the new Martin Amis […] in book form, but when I try it in electronic form I tire. There’s too much intensity going on. Good writing is so much to do with an aesthetic, with a resonance of language which is apparent on paper but not on a screen. The e‐novel is aesthetic free, resonance free, concerns itself rightly with happenings, cliff‐hangers, suspense.
(Weldon 2014)
Reflection
Besides acknowledging the intellectual effort an author puts into crafting a work, we also need to consider effort on the reader’s part. A fast‐paced thriller may not make appreciable demands, but other works have – and do.
In his 1940 classic How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler argued that reading is serious business: “The most direct sign that you have done the work of reading is fatigue. Reading that is reading entails the most intense mental activity. If you are not tired out, you probably have not been doing the work.” How to Read a Book offers detailed steps for “doing the work.” Key among them is writing as you read: “One of the reasons why I find reading a slow process is that I keep a record of the […] thinking I do. I cannot go on reading the next page, if I do not make a memo of something which occurred to me in reading this one” (Adler 1940: 110–111). Edgar Allan Poe had a similar take on the importance of annotation: “In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general” (Poe 1844: 484). In my own studies, students commented frequently on the role of annotation in learning. When asked about the one thing they liked best about reading in print, 38% of US participants said ease of annotation.
Poe’s comments remind us that part of what it means to read – at least with serious reading – is to respond to the work’s author. Marcel Proust in 1905 wrote insightfully about the relationship between author and reader, counseling readers to conduct a conversation with the author. Proust warned against the temptation to be a passive reader: “We can receive the truth from nobody […] we must create it ourselves” (Proust 1971: 35). Moreover, we should not assume authors are omniscient. Rather, to read is to have meaningful dialogue with authors, which might result in disagreements. Reading, says Proust, entails a friendship, but with a person either dead or otherwise absent. We can be bluntly honest in our responses. We never need ask of our authors, as we might of real‐life friends with whom we discuss a book, “What did they think of us? Didn’t we lack tact? Did we please?” (Proust 1971: 53, 55).
To reflect on something we have read, it helps to have the text physically at hand. Seeing a book on a shelf – even if we don’t take it down – can remind us of its contents or of what we were thinking when we first read it. Virtual books reside on our eReader or tablet, but out of sight can be out of mind. By way of analogy, think of digital photography, which typically lacks the gravitas of its acetate progenitor. Research suggests we don’t take the same care in framing a digital shot as we did with film (Larsen 2014). We also don’t revisit our digital photos the way we used to seek out – or stumble upon – photos and photo albums.
Lack of connection with digital materials is not surprising. In the words of Microsoft researcher Abigail Sellen, people “think of using an e‐book, not owning an e‐book” (cited in Jabr 2013). Research by Sellen and her colleagues (Odom et al. 2012) indicates that while their informants viewed material possessions as part of their identity, digital possessions (such as digital photos on mobile phones or postings to an online social network) did not seem as “real.”
The physicality of print can also encourage rereading. In my pilot studies, students reported being more likely to reread materials (in this case, for schoolwork) if they were in print rather than digital. Rereading academic materials has obvious implications for success in examinations. But the benefits of rereading – especially of serious works – are potentially more profound. Rereading makes us think not just about the work but about ourselves. Literature professor Patricia Meyer Spacks writes: “Rereading brings us more sharply in contact with how we – like the books we reread – have both changed and remained the same. Books help to constitute our identity” (Spacks 2011: 9). Or, in the words of author Verlyn Klinkenborg, “rereading […] is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does” (Klinkenborg 2009).
Text Length
Related to the issues of concentration, complexity, and reflection is the question of length: Does the number of words in a piece influence readers’ preference for a print or digital copy?
It does. I asked students about their preferences when reading long versus short text, both for school and for pleasure. When reading long spans of text for school, 92% of US students in the sample (and 95% of Germans) preferred to read in hardcopy. When reading long‐form for pleasure, preference for print was still high (85% in the USA; 88% in Germany). With shorter amounts of text (both for schoolwork and for pleasure), choice of platform was far more mixed.
In thinking about length and reading platform, we should be mindful that text first encountered digitally might end up as print. A number of respondents reported printing out material they initially accessed onscreen and then reading it. Others first read the piece online but then printed it. Among researchers and professionals, both strategies are highly familiar.
Finally, the length issue can be a matter of perception. One student observed that she perceives works to be longer in print than onscreen, even when the two formats contain the same number of words.
The Aesthetic and Sensory Sides of Reading
Beyond its cognitive aspects, reading sometimes entails aesthetic and sensory dimensions. We might anticipate hearing sentiments of this sort voiced by older readers. Yet today’s young adults are unexpectedly vocal about such pleasures of print. When asked what they liked most about reading in hardcopy, university students talked about finding it relaxing, feeling affection for its physicality, and experiencing the charm of turning the pages. One young man sang the praises of Moroccan tooled leather. And 10% of the Slovakian participants volunteered that what they liked most about reading print was the smell of books.
The physicality of print comes into sharp focus through students’ comments involving touch and sight. When asked what they liked most about reading in hardcopy, 13% in the US sample and 24% in Germany wrote about the tactile experience: holding the book, turning pages, feeling their texture. By contrast, digital screens caused visual discomfort. Responding to the question of what they liked least about reading onscreen, 30% in the USA complained about eyestrain.
Perhaps most surprising was students declaring that what they liked most about reading print was that it was “real reading.” This observation was most prevalent among the Japanese (15% of all “like most” responses), but also cropped up in data from Germany, Slovakia, and India.
Looking at even younger readers than the ones I surveyed, we find a persistent affinity for print. The most recent “Kids and Family Reading Report” issued by Scholastic offers useful insights on children aged 6–17. While the number of children who had read an eBook increased between 2012 and 2014, the proportion who preferred print also rose. The same is true of children’s agreement with the statement “I’ll always want to read books printed on paper even though there are ebooks available.” The 2014 study showed 65% of respondents in agreement – up from 60% in 2012 (Scholastic 2015). The 65% figure held steady in 2016 (Scholastic 2017).
Part of the charm of physical books is that they generate a sense of accomplishment – even pride – that digital equivalents do not. You can use your fingers to measure how many pages of Moby Dick you have read. And when you’re done, you can place the book on your shelf to mark the achievement. In focus groups conducted by Scholastic, younger readers were vocal on this point (Bellis 2015).
The Pragmatic Side of Reading
Besides the cognitive and the aesthetic/sensory dimensions to reading, there is the pragmatic side. At issue are such considerations as convenience, cost, and the environment.
Convenience
Ask eBook aficionados what they like most about reading onscreen, and you will likely hear about convenience: Going on a trip? Ditch the pile of printed books in favor of a lightweight eReader. The same argument applies to lightening students’ backpacks.
My surveys confirmed the sentiment. In the American sample, 34% said what they liked most about reading onscreen was the convenience, meaning either portability, avoidance of a storage problem, or overall ease of use. Another 21% enjoyed the direct access to material – being able to store multiple readings on a single device or having particular texts readily available. Less commonly, students in the United States and elsewhere reported liking print because of its portability, though as mobile phones increasingly replace laptops, dedicated eReaders, and tablets as reading platforms that perception could change.
Cost
It is generally true, especially in the United States, that eBooks are less expensive than print equivalents. In other parts of the world, the pricing issue is more nuanced, thanks to national regulations involving fixed prices on books and differential taxing structures for print versus electronic publications (Baron 2015: 192–196).
Students – and school systems – are abundantly aware of these differences. When acquiring textbooks for the upcoming semester, my own university students repeatedly tell me that price rules their reading‐platform choice. Throughout the USA, the move to digital textbooks in K–12 commonly reflects this logic.
But the cost issue is more complex. For starters, there is the ownership question. You may think you have “bought” an eBook from Amazon, but actually you are only leasing it. You can’t sell it to someone else or even give it away. Second, purchasing a used print book rather than a new one is nearly always less expensive than the digital equivalent.
Even more importantly, young adults are aware of the tradeoffs between cost savings and preference when making book‐buying decisions. I asked students: If the cost of the book were the same, would you prefer to buy hardcopy or digital? In the United States, 89% answered they would prefer print for school purchases and 81% for leisure reading. (In Germany, the corresponding results were 94% for schoolwork and 90% for pleasure.)
These responses should give us pause, especially in light of our earlier discussion of concentration. If 92% of US subjects said it was easiest to concentrate when reading in print, and 89% of those same students would prefer print over digital for schoolwork if the price were the same, we can reasonably conclude that price, rather than pedagogy, is the main driver of book acquisition.
Environmental Issues
The final component of our pragmatics discussion is environmental issues. Young people’s concerns about the environment shape their attitudes regarding use of paper. In the eyes of many students, moving from print to digital reading is an ecological boon. My studies over the years have elicited such comments as books are “more damaging for the environment,” “kill trees,” and “consume paper.”
Again, the story is more complicated. Paper is a highly renewable resource, and increasingly, paper is made from either recycled material or waste from sawmills. By contrast, the manufacture of digital devices requires use of rare earth minerals, generally mined in conflict‐filled countries in Africa where children do the extraction (a toxic and dangerous job), and profits go to warlords. What’s more, while we happily access servers and park terabytes of data in “the cloud,” the energy consumption needed to power and cool those servers is immense. The jury is still out on whether paper or digital is actually more environmentally friendly.
A further issue is the tension expressed by some students between what they believe (rightly or wrongly) to be best for the environment versus their own preference in reading platform. These are some telling comments from participants in my US studies: “I like that digital screens save paper but it is hard to concentrate when reading on them”; “While I prefer reading things in Hard copy, I can’t bring myself to print out online material simply for the environmental considerations. However, I highly, highly prefer things in Hard copy – just to clarify.”
Reinventing Reading and Reading Spaces
We have been exploring the cognitive, aesthetic/sensory, and pragmatic dimensions of how the digital revolution is shaping reading perspectives and practices, especially among young adults in the United States. How are readers – and writers – responding to the new landscape?
Curling Up with a Good SnackRead
Earlier we noted Fay Weldon counseling those writing for digital audiences to go for short page‐turners that don’t trouble readers “with too much thought.” An emphasis on “short” has come to pervade the writing landscape in an attempt to attract digital readers who can or will devote only limited amounts of time to reading.
In the academic world, publishers are offering “short” or “brief” monographs in the hopes readers will purchase, say, 30 000–40 000 word offerings where they might eschew longer works. The short story is making a comeback, as are serializations of full‐length books. Online reading sites such as longreads.com offer a variety of literary pieces, each tagged with the number of words and how many minutes it should take to read them. In the realm of popular reading done onscreen, we find an array of sites serving up short pieces, including SnackReads.com, which initially presented itself to readers as “a fun, bite‐size ebook, perfect for your lunch break, your commute, or right before bed.”
As publishers and digital start‐ups coax writers to generate short texts, we can only anticipate that a substantial number of readers will come to expect that reading should not demand too much of their time.
Who Has Time to Read?
The snackreads mentality is evidenced not just among professionals or adults looking for a bit of leisure reading. It can also be seen among students.
Start with college‐age students. How much reading students do is likely reflected in the number of hours they spend studying. In the United States, that tally has shriveled over the past half‐century, from about 24 hours a week in the early 1960s to roughly 15 hours per week (de Vise 2012).
To be fair, much else has changed in America during those years. The number of students attending college has skyrocketed from fewer than five million in the early 1960s to over 20 million (National Center for Education Statistics n.d.). At the same time, demands on college students’ time have dramatically increased, including paid employment, internships, sports, volunteer work, and social obligations. Unlike their parents’ or grandparents’ generation, today’s students often don’t have the luxury of devoting the bulk of their time to studying.
What about their younger brethren? Perhaps not surprisingly, far more parents (84% in the 2017 Scholastic study) think it is important for their 6–17‐year‐old children to read for fun than do the children themselves (among whom only 55% agree). The numbers of those who actually read for fun generally decline as children get older. While 65% of 6–8‐year‐olds said they enjoyed reading books for fun, only 54% of 15–17‐year‐olds, but an even lower 50% of 12–14‐year‐olds agreed.
Maybe the older students had come to find reading boring, especially in hardcopy. Recall the college student who found it difficult to read in print because he kept waiting for some interruption to emanate from his reading platform (of the sort he had come to expect when using a laptop or mobile phone). Perhaps not surprisingly, several students had this to say when I asked what they liked least about reading in hardcopy: “Just boring material and hard to read”; “It takes time to sit down and focus on the material.” In more recent work my colleagues and I have done with middle and high school students residing in Norway, 9% of all responses to the question of what they liked least about reading in print were that print was boring (Tyo‐Dickerson et al. 2019).
Being bored when doing reading assignments for school is hardly a new phenomenon. However, in my research, students only complained that reading print was boring. And logically so, since if the reader’s attention flags when using a digital device, the Internet is only a click or swipe away.
Rooms of Reading
Yet serious reading does exist in this digital age. Books are selling – both in print and digitally. In 2018, the US trade book industry saw revenue increase 4.6% over the previous year. While print sales were up overall, eBook sales continued to decline (AAP StatShot 2019).
Despite the demise of Borders and challenges faced by Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores are finding audiences and increased economic viability. Several examples outside the United States offer intriguing models for American brick‐and‐mortar book emporia. One is Foyles’s elegant flagship bookshop in London on Charing Cross Road, housing four miles of bookshelves, a cafe, and an auditorium. In Italy, Feltrinelli RED bookstores invite people to “Read, Eat, Dream.” Writer Tom Downey, a self‐described “early‐adopting, SIM card‐swapping travel geek, currently on my seventh Kindle,” writes how the Tokyo bookstore Tsutaya “made me fall back in love with print” (Downey 2015). American independent bookstores are defining themselves as places where people meet – to get book suggestions, for community events, for book signings, and yes, to read.
Nonetheless, it would be Pollyanna‐ish to suppose the entire population is or will become devoted readers. Critic George Steiner reached this conclusion, declaring that “reading in the full sense was always the prerogative of an elite” and maintaining that serious literacy is a special skill, not to be demanded of everyone. (As Steiner put it, “We do not, after all, demand that all citizens be trapeze artists.”) Steiner went on to argue that “we must try to see to [it] […] that those who want to learn to read fully can do so and that they be allowed the critical space and freedom from competing noise in which to practice their passion.” These words were published in 1972 – long before the digital revolution (Steiner 1972: 210).
Putting the Digital Revolution and Reading in Context
What is the impact of the digital revolution – now and potentially in the future – on American reading habits? For a holistic view, we need to consider not just how such technology may be impacting reading (our task thus far) but also other factors that might be shaping reading patterns. For these, we focus on changes in the American population and shifts in American values.
The Changing American Population
Reading is a cultural activity. Historically, relatively few people were literate, even after the appearance of writing (an invention independently occurring in multiple societies, first in Mesopotamia about 3200 BCE). Literacy spread, particularly in the modern world, with growing wealth, access to education, and the power of religion. However, the word “literate” is hardly univocal. In earlier centuries, people might be deemed literate if they could read aloud from the Bible or, in other cases, sign their name. Today, the ability to read a “help wanted” advertisement in a newspaper is not the same as meaningfully tackling Finnegans Wake.
The Protestant foundation of the American colonies helped build an early literacy base, especially in New England, where by the end of the Colonial period, literacy among white males was near universal (Lockridge 1974). As new waves of immigrants entered the United States, that statistic dropped – at least for literacy in English – largely due to poverty, limited educational opportunity, or not knowing English. These same challenges have continued to dog American literacy trends (Staggering Illiteracy Statistics n.d.).
Changing American Values
America’s earlier emphasis on reading has been wavering, as documented since the early 1980s by the National Endowment for the Arts. A study from the NEA indicates that, in 2017, the number of Americans who were reading books of any sort for pleasure had dipped slightly from 2008: 53% in 2017 compared with 55% in 2008 (Milliot 2018). But the count of adults who had read at least one novel or short story in the previous year had continued its decline, back to the level in 2002, namely 47%. Compare that with the figure from 1982, which was 56% (Milliot 2018; National Endowment for the Arts 2013).
The uncertain state of reading is especially evident on American college campuses. The amount of reading students do – at least the amount assigned – has long varied with course selection. Literature, history, or philosophy offerings are traditionally reading intensive, compared with physics or foreign languages.
Recent years have seen major shifts in the subject areas students are pursuing. These young adults have been moving away from disciplines typically classified as belonging to the humanities in favor of studying finance, economics, communication, or public affairs. The motivation commonly reflects a career mentality: What major will best help me get a job? Among today’s undergraduates, the “reading” disciplines are progressively less valued.
Added to the mix is the struggle university faculty across the disciplinary spectrum are experiencing with students not “doing the reading.” The faculty’s response has increasingly been to shorten their reading lists. Where before they assigned five books for the semester, the list is now down to two. Where a book was required in the past, the new assignment is an article or chapter. Other substitutions involve replacing written text with oral or visual materials. Instead of an article, students now listen to a podcast. Instead of a chapter, they might view a YouTube or TED Talk.
Without passing judgment on the educational efficacy of these choices, we can say that today’s students are doing less reading in college than their forebears, at least those attending more rigorous schools.
At the same time, shifts in American lower education curricula, particularly engendered by new Common Core standards, are reshaping the reading skills and practices we can anticipate among the next generation of college students. Full‐length works of fiction are being replaced by excerpts plus related short non‐fiction works selected to make the literary sample “relevant.” The working assumption behind this shift is that tomorrow’s adults will have more need for procuring and processing information than for understanding plot, character, or stylistic nuance (Taylor 2015).
Beyond issues of curricular choice, faculty assignments, and national educational agendas, we also find changes in how people are using their free time. The trend is away from reading. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, appearing in its annual American Time Use Survey, confirms an overall decline in reading for pleasure. While in 2003, 28% of those surveyed did some pleasure reading on a given day, the figure was down to 19% in 2017. Earlier, people averaged 23 minutes of leisure reading a day, but that number has dropped to 17 minutes. The figures are even lower for young people: among those aged 15–19: 8.4 minutes daily; among those aged 20–24: 6.6 minutes daily (Ingraham 2018; US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018). Focusing on teens, Nielsen Book reports that 41% of the teenagers they surveyed don’t read for pleasure. That number had been a comparatively benign 21% in 2011 (“Teens Don’t Read for Fun Anymore” 2014).
With so many possible activities vying for young people’s time – be it working at internships, watching YouTube or Netflix, or sending Snapchats – interest in reading faces palpable challenges. These challenges impact both print and digital reading, though recent trends suggest some potential bright spots for both platforms, at least in the near future.
Reading in a “Both/And” World
By the mid‐2010s, the publishing industry had shifted its earlier discourse that digital books might soon trounce print to a dialogue of “both/and.” In 2014, digital books grew only 3.8% in the United States over the previous year (New AAP Figures 2015). As we have already seen (AAP StatShot 2019), eBook sales continue to decline while print sales have been holding their own. Meanwhile, data from the Pew Research Center indicate not only that Americans read both print and digital, but that people using multiple platforms read more than those only reading print (Rainie et al. 2012).
On the digital front, novel enhancements and opportunities continue to be created for reading onscreen. In mid‐2015, Google introduced a new font, Literata, specially tailored for long reads on eBooks available via Google Books. With the rise of wearable mobile devices, app developers have been exploring options for reading on screens with truly minimal real estate. For example, the social reading platform Glose released an app for the Apple Watch.
Reading while traveling serves as a good bellwether for the “both/and” world that seems to be emerging. Historically, travel has been a venue in which people often settle in with a book. In fact, it was the rise of the railroads in England in the mid‐nineteenth century that spurred production of inexpensive books that vacationers could take with them. W.H. Smith opened his first bookstall in London’s Euston Station in 1848, the same year George Routledge began his Railway Library.
Today, travel remains a time often available for reading, though readers are likely to already be toting digital devices. Responding to this trend, a growing collection of eBook purveyors are supplying electronic reading material to travelers: By mid‐2015, HarperCollins was providing JetBlue flyers with free samples of selected eBooks, Kobo had eBook offerings for passengers on Southwest flights, and Penguin Random did so for riders on Amtrak’s Acela.
But print has hardly disappeared from the travel context. Sit on a subway, in an airport lounge, or on a train, and you can see people reading print – including younger people. Airline magazines still exist, including a new one called Rhapsody (for United First and Business Class passengers). Notably, Rhapsody includes pieces by such literary notables as Elmore Leonard, Anthony Doerr, and Joyce Carol Oates (Alter 2015).
Digital technology is a powerful – and enticing – tool. Like all technologies, platforms that offer us new ways of accessing the written word can be expected to affect human practice. However, those who study technology are equally alert to flaws in theories of technological determinism (Smith and Marx 1994). Just because we have automobiles does not mean we have stopped walking. (For that matter, bicycles – an older technology – are enjoying a resurgence in the United States.)
Undoubtedly, digital screens are challenging some of our fundamental reading values: the ability to concentrate without distraction, to reflect on what we read, to make our books (and our reading of them) part of who we become. At the same time, new technologies increase opportunities to read. It will be up to those who care about the written word to map out a meaningful “both/and” world of reading for ourselves and for the next generation.
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