It shouldn’t feel impossible to finish a book

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.”

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.

“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.”

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 you’re able to put new information in context. In other words, the more you read, the better you get at it. And probably as a result, the less appealing algorithmic feeds become.

It’s one of those personal habits that extends beyond your own life, too. Becoming a better reader is good for American society. The nation’s founders believed that an informed citizenry was necessary to preserve democracy — and to prevent tyranny. A nation of people passively flipping through 10-second videos on a smartphone or bedrotting with a streaming show can be informed in a sense. You might want to be a better American.

The big question, then, is: How does one become a better reader in an era that increasingly appears to be postliterate? Actually, there are some interesting insights — and ironically, some technology — that can help.

One thing that keeps a lot of people from reading is simply friction. Reading can be hard — or at least effortful — for a lot of different reasons.

For me, I hit friction every time I pick up all 1,300 dense pages of The Power Broker by Robert Caro. It’s the weight of a doorstop in my hands, as I struggle with the context of mid-century New York bureaucratic history, ultimately unsure if I’ll live long enough to reach the end of the book. Reading is full of friction, and finding ways to reduce friction is one way to read better.

Technology is good at this. Just take the growth in e-book popularity as proof. Whereas people over 65 have historically read more than young people, more than 40 percent of young people have read an e-book in the past year, according to an April Pew study. You can’t blame them. Once you get used to the lack of pages and paper, e-readers are incredibly convenient. The classic Kindle Paperwhite is more portable than a doorstop, and you can keep an entire library on something the size of a side plate. It’s even waterproof, or at least more waterproof than paper. More advanced devices, like the Kobo Libre Colour, offer color e-ink displays and the ability to scribble on the page.

What turned me into a Kindle enthusiast is the existence of Libby, an app that lets you check out e-books from your local library. From the comfort of the New York City subway, I can find, borrow, and download just about any book I’d ever want and start reading it in a matter of seconds. You might call this a frictionless experience. The raw simplicity of the device also means that I can’t easily navigate away from the book to check my email or start doomscrolling.

Audiobooks open up another avenue: the ability to read a book while doing something else, like chores or driving. You might disagree on whether listening to an audiobook counts as “reading,” but there’s evidence that people can comprehend and retain information from audiobooks equally as well as they can from printed material. Audiobooks can even make difficult language more accessible for more readers.

There are drawbacks, too. Audiobooks force you to listen at the speed of the narrator, although you can probably speed it up or slow it down in increments. And it’s difficult to go back and review the text or to skip ahead, which is also true for e-books. This spatial component of reading is something that printed books will always have going for them. Rereading text can improve comprehension, and the spatial nature of books makes it easier to find certain passages. Just think about that effortless feeling of flipping back toward the beginning of a book for that really juicy section. That’s not easy to do on a Kindle or with an e-book.

There’s an interesting paradox here: In order to become a better reader, you need to reduce enough friction that you read more. But you also need to preserve certain kinds of friction that help you fully appreciate what you’re reading.

There’s a good reason your teachers and professors assigned hard books when you were in school. “Learning only happens when there is some cognitive friction, if you’re actually grappling with the ideas,” said Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia.

Reading difficult text, scribbling notes in the margins, rereading the difficult text, taking breaks to think about it — this friction-full process leads to deeper comprehension. Certain inconveniences that come with reading print books, including turning physical pages and navigating the spatial elements of the object, invite you to do the mental work that promotes learning. Screens, with their lack of friction, may actually make it harder to comprehend what you’re reading.

The advantage of print is small but meaningful. A 2018 meta-analysis of nearly two decades’ worth of studies showed that paper-based reading had a slight advantage to screen-based reading when it came to comprehension, especially when dealing with informational texts, rather than narratives. Another meta-analysis published a year later suggested that readers were more efficient when reading on paper and, interestingly, seemed to have a more accurate awareness of how well they understood the text. In other words, when you read on your phone, you might think you’re absorbing more than you actually are.

There are other drawbacks to reading on screens. Scrolling alone is bad for comprehension, according to yet another meta-analysis, because it basically forces us to lose our place on the page. There’s also been research into how reading on screens demands more of our cognitive resources than reading on paper, perhaps because the technology requires the reader to process more information, leaving them with a little less gas in the tank to actually comprehend the text. But again, plenty of studies show that the difference in how well we comprehend information by reading on screens versus print is small.

What’s perhaps more meaningful are the vibes we bring when we approach a medium. We’ve been trained to read on screens a certain way, according to Naomi Baron, a professor emerita of linguistics at American University. From the early days of Google, screens became places where we searched and scanned for information, quickly clicking through to the next page in pursuit of an answer. That’s a far cry from the millennia-old tradition of poring over printed manuscripts.

“We got used to thinking a digital device is that which one doesn’t concentrate on,” Baron said. “One keeps moving like a shark. … Print is a medium that encourages stopping.”

It turns out two things can be true. Indeed, keeping a smartphone next to you while you’re trying to read a book is an invitation to distraction. You may also feel like your attention span is already shredded, probably thanks to your smartphone. You just have to be more intentional about your attention and harness your focus. Taking breaks can help restore your attention stamina, especially if you do so in nature. Try reading a book for a few minutes every day, and you’ll soon find that you can read for longer. The next thing you know, you’ll have read a book.

Let’s not lose the plot here

Some people read to learn. Others read because their job demands it. The luckiest of us read for fun. Some people read to escape or to imagine. And depending on your purpose, you might choose a different approach or device to stuff that text into your brain.

If you’re simply trying to become a better reader, it doesn’t matter how you do it.

You should keep reading, again, because reading more makes you better at reading. If you’re trying to learn, printed books can facilitate that, but you can also learn quite a bit by listening to an audiobook. If a Kindle and a library card can unlock all the hard sci-fi and fantasy your eyes could ever consume, go for it and enjoy.

Part of what keeps some people from reading, I have to imagine, is the preconception that reading needs to be difficult to be rewarding. And as many teachers and professors will point out to you, navigating your mind through the difficult text can be especially rewarding, since that friction leads to better comprehension and learning. Still, you don’t need to read everything like you’re trying to get a good grade.

“There are no rules about leisure reading,” Willingham told me. “You can peek at the end. If you’re not enjoying a book, drop it. You can do whatever you want. The whole point is for you to have fun.”

You should read material that feels magnetic to you, that keeps you coming back for more. If reading is going to have any chance of competing with TikTok, it needs to be interesting and compelling, regardless of how literary or sophisticated you might think reading needs to be. You should read books, longform articles, and blog posts on whatever medium makes sense in that moment — and whatever medium makes it easy to keep reading.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to read the big difficult, doorstopper-sized classics, though, if that’s important to you. Just think twice about using AI to summarize what you’re reading. It’s tempting to ask ChatGPT why Anna Karenina is a classic — I just did, and ChatGPT says “psychological realism, moral complexity, continuing relevance” — but it’s not fun.

Using AI as a reading partner may help initial understanding of reading material, but old habits like note-taking better promote engagement and long-term comprehension. Pia Kreijkes, senior researcher at Cambridge University Press & Assessment and author of a study on this topic published earlier this year, is worried about young people leaning on AI to do more of the cognitive lifting that reading requires.

“Given that children are already on a trajectory of declining reading frequency and enjoyment, and that reading skills are also declining, we should be very concerned about this,” Kreijkes said. “The more we use AI to reduce our reading effort, the more likely reading skills are to decline.”

After all, if the kids stop reading, there’s not a whole lot of hope for future generations to be readers of books. If we let technology remove too much friction from our pursuit of knowledge, we will lose the plot entirely and slide into the postliterate horror so many people are currently afraid of, AI-dominated dystopia and all. When you put it that way, though, this is also a great premise for a sci-fi novel.