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.