Did Smartphones Really Kill Reading?

Did smartphones kill reading? In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch laments that “The Age of Reading is Over.” We still, she observes, encounter many words, but increasingly find them in emails, text messages, Instagram captions, and other digital fragments rather than in books. This kind of reading tends to be brief and distracted, quite different from the focused attention encouraged by print.

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Modern readers may still be able to decode words, Horowitch argues, but they struggle to comprehend longer texts. Our society is not illiterate, but postliterate.

It is tempting to blame smartphones for this condition and conclude that some kind of ban would solve the problem. But a historical perspective shows that this is not enough: reading was in decline before the smartphone appeared.

In 1988, the literary critic George Steiner announced that “the age of the book” was coming to “a gradual end.” Gradual is the key word here. Steiner believed the decline had begun in the 1950s, with the growth of radio, cinema, and television. The electronic media of the 1980s continued the transformation but did not initiate it.

The data support Steiner’s instinct. In 1976, more than 60 percent of American 12th-graders said they read a book or magazine for pleasure almost every day. From then on, the share declined by about one percentage point a year through the arrival of video games, personal computers, the internet, and smartphones. Forty years later, only 15 percent of high school students read for pleasure almost every day.

The introduction of the internet and smartphones did not produce a sudden collapse of reading. Americans spent an average of 21.9 minutes a day reading for personal interest in 2003, compared with 18.3 minutes in 2010 and 16.2 minutes in 2025. These figures indicate no sudden break coinciding with the arrival of the iPhone, but a long, steady decline.

First, protect the printed book.

Technology is part of the story, but not the whole story. What has eroded, more broadly, is the culture that once made reading part of everyday life. To understand how this happened—and how it might be reversed—we must take a longer historical view.

Reading became a popular practice in the nineteenth century, thanks to a combination of material and social changes. Cheaper paper, steam-powered printing, compulsory education, and improved lighting made books accessible to millions. Libraries, churches, labor movements, literary societies, and reading circles gave people reasons to read and communities in which to do so. Together, these developments created a bookish culture.

In nineteenth-century Paris, a visitor marveled at the widespread appetite for literature: “Everyone, but women in particular, is carrying a book in their pocket. People read while riding in carriages or taking walks; they read at the theatre during the interval, in cafés, even when bathing.”

The flourishing reading culture of this era was sustained by an entire ecosystem. If we wish to restore it, it will not be enough to remove one distracting device. Instead, we must rebuild the conditions that make concentrated reading possible. This requires at least three things.

First, protect the printed book.

The printed book is a technology built for attention. It presents the text without the competing demands of hyperlinks, videos, or notifications, allowing us to remain focused on the page. At the same time, the thickness of the book helps us gauge our location in the story or argument, and keeps us oriented by giving us a sense of how far we have travelled and how much remains. This materiality supports memory as well: we often remember where on a page we encountered something—whether it was on the right or left, high or low.

Digital devices can help us find information quickly, but print is better suited to focused reading. Schools therefore need to continue championing books, yet the trend has lately moved in the opposite direction. In 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English declared that it was time to “decenter book reading” in order to address “inequalities in digital technologies and competencies.” But equity can be used as an argument in support of the opposite approach. Children who do not grow up surrounded by books depend on schools to introduce them to sustained reading. Like computers, printed books are a technology that must be learned.

Second, we need spaces where reading is the norm.

We often treat concentration as a private test of willpower. But attention is shaped by architecture, atmosphere, and social expectations. We behave differently in a library than in a shopping mall because rooms tell us what kinds of activity belong there.

Today, communal reading offers an example of how print and digital media can work in tandem to renew reading.

Libraries, independent bookstores, schools, and cafés can become what Steiner called “houses of reading”: places where silence, slowness, and absorption are not eccentric forms of behavior. In Norway, media scholar Espen Ytreberg introduced voluntary “shut up and read” sessions, in which students gather in rooms free from digital distractions and read silently together. There are also cafés which ask customers to put away their phones. Such spaces create temporary refuges from the digital stream, and allow habits of slowness, concentration, and absorption to become socially reinforced.

Third, make reading social again.

The image of the reader is usually solitary: one person alone with a book. But throughout history, reading has repeatedly been renewed by communities. When the Dark Ages descended on the ancient world, Benedict of Nursia ignited a monastic revival that would establish thousands of monasteries and train generations of devoted readers. And in the nineteenth century, religious revivals, the labor movement, African American communities, and other popular movements organized circles that fused reading with collective action. Books mattered not only because they were read, but because people read them together.

Today, communal reading offers an example of how print and digital media can work in tandem to renew reading. Online book clubs, fan sites, and discussion forums foster literary communities in which devoted readers not only discuss what they have read but also extend the stories through fan fiction. At the same time, some students have founded “Luddite clubs,” where digital devices are banned and members gather to read and converse.

If we want reading to endure, tossing our smartphones into the nearest river will not be enough. Good readers are formed by a bookish culture, and it is this culture that we must try and rebuild. Reading will never survive as an individual act of heroic resistance; history shows that reading is and always has been a solitary act sustained by communities.

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Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age by Joel Halldorf is available from NYU Press.