Sitting on my commuter train this morning. There’s not a single person in my carriage visibly reading a book. Phones, laptops, and sleepers. No one stares aimlessly out the window. No books. Granted, digital books complicate this observation. Someone staring at their screen might be reading Proust. Might be.
Ten years from now, reading serious literature will resemble playing the harpsichord: a minority pursuit, respected by some, incomprehensible to most. We can debate serious another time.
Literature will split into two streams. First: industrial, personalised content algorithmically engineered for engagement. Second: actual literature from small presses, translated work, poetry, serious fiction. A smaller audience, intensely committed, but considered performative for producing a book in public.
Literature itself will continue doing what it has always done: offering the fusion of entertainment and effort, creating space for interiority, preserving what matters about being human, but for fewer people.
Or the pessimistic view: literature becomes archaic, like Latin or handwritten letters. Beautiful, respected, functionally dead outside universities and small circles. Let’s spin an optimistic view: precisely because everything else is optimised content, literature becomes more valuable. The last place for actual human thought and style.
Does literature survive this? Or does it become museum culture? I think it survives, but smaller, more essential, like poetry after the novel’s ascendance: diminished in reach, not in significance. The question is whether you’ll be among those still reading it.
I do read on my phone when I travel! I sometimes can’t fit my books comfortably in my bag, and so I’ll download something lighter like Madame Bovary or Secret Garden onto my phone. A book that still has depth, but the prose doesn’t require the same level of focus as Proust haha.
My partner and I do worry about losing our capacity to read more ambitious books. We’re deliberatly pushing against it, but it’s challenging when everything else is training you to do otherwise. I think I’d have considerable difficulty with some of the books you comfortably read.
Thanks for continuing to set a positive example.
I cannot claim immunity. It’s a struggle. It’s rare I can read for three or four hours straight as I used often to do. Poetry helps, and fiction from the times when writers had wider vocabulary and were better read.
recently from The Atlantic: “If you read a book in 2025—just one book—you belong to an endangered species.” seemed inconceivable until i started looking around. a view not dissimilar to yours. perhaps it’s this reason the endangered among us endure online spaces to discuss books. Dickinson famously asked “How do most people live without any thought?” i wonder how people live without books.
It still shocks me, but perhaps in 2026 it should not. Maybe algorithmically personalised books will bring people back to reading, and one day, in impoverishment, to literature.
When I’m out and about I rarely see people with physical books, though I can hope that they are at least reading digitally. But as people’s attention spans get destroyed we’ll see less and less reading, though I think it will survive. I couldn’t live without books and I don’t know how people can.
I cannot imagine how different I would feel without fiction.
Did you know that in Argentina a post on X started a debate by claiming that reading a book during a short subway ride looks like showing off? The tweet suggested that someone reading on the subway for just fifteen minutes was being performative or trying to seem interesting, and that comment went viral with many reactions. The future is here, it seems.
I’ve seen similar discussions on Reddit with readers reading on mobiles because a book in public looks performative.