When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future
Having spent my entire adult life within the book publishing world, I’ve often heard the claim that people no longer read and that the industry is dying. This narrative repeats endlessly. In August, a report revealed that pleasure reading has dropped by 40% over the past 20 years. However, the decline in leisure reading is not new: innovations like the Victrola, the talkies, television, Nintendo, and now the internet, have all gradually reduced our reading time. Yet, people still read.
Last week, I encountered a Slate article titled “The Case for Whole Books” by Dan Sinykin and Joanna Winant, which triggered a new kind of concern about the future of the industry. As someone without children and not involved in education, I had been unaware that standardized testing pressures—favoring close analysis of excerpts rather than entire books—have left a whole generation of students with scant context for the literature they study in school.
Previously, I wrote about how the tech industry attempts to convert books into easily digestible Blinkist-style summaries, but I hadn’t realized that children are also being offered similarly reduced, less enriching knowledge snippets.
“Because of standardized testing requirements that favor close reads of excerpts over whole books, there’s an entire generation of students who have very little contextual framework for the literature they’re being taught in school.”
“The tech industry has been trying to transform books into easily uploadable Blinkist-style digests.”
These trends suggest a growing undervaluation of deep, immersive reading, posing a threat not only to books but to the future of thoughtful learning and culture.
Author’s summary: The decline in whole-book reading, driven by educational practices and tech trends, risks eroding the deep literary understanding essential for a meaningful future.
Would you prefer a more formal or conversational tone for the final text?