We are shaped by a lifetime of books read for pleasure, so what happens if we become skimmers?

1 August 2022 – Most scare stories around the book industry make fabulous headlines, but are best read as fiction. The novel is alive, despite multiple doomsday predictions; the Kindle has so far failed to kill off the physical book; older teens and young adults bucked gloomy prophecies that their generation doesn’t read and helped to drive book sales up last year through #BookTok videos on the social media platform TikTok. 

I’m with the optimists on the resilience of books, writing and publishing – but, like many people, I struggle at times to focus on reading for pleasure in our shimmering, omnipresent digital world. It’s a paradox of modern life: while our laptops and smartphones are saturated with text, we often find we have neither the time nor the attention to read for fun.

This problem is well-documented. In 2018, Miha Kovač and Adriaan van der Weel, two European academics, published a report on the changes in reading habits brought about by screen technologies. While literacy, measured in part by the amount of text consumed on the internet, seemed to be exploding, they pointed to the growing preference for pithy, succinct infobytes: “We are living in an era of proliferation of short texts and stagnation of long texts.”

For young children, in contrast to teenagers and young adults, reading for pleasure is increasingly rare. Two recent studies point to a disturbing but now well-established trend — reading for pleasure has become far less common among children. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the US conducted a survey of children aged nine and 13 throughout 2019-2020, which found that only 42 per cent of the nine-year-olds and 17 per cent of the 13-year-olds said they read for fun almost every day. Meanwhile, the Farshore study, published in the UK in March, reported that “only 25 per cent of children [said] they read daily or nearly every day for pleasure, rather than schoolwork”.

As a life-long reader who discovered lasting delight in the tiny libraries of my hometown in the U.S. (my Mom would take every 3 weeks to get a new batch to read), it’s disquieting to me that this generation experiences reading as drudgery, rather than the joy it can be. But in 1960s America, books were alluring. To me, anyway.

But now, for young children, in contrast to teenagers and young adults, reading for pleasure is increasingly rare

Aside from delight, the benefits of reading for pleasure – a greater sense of empathy, tolerance, curiosity – are well known, but these depend on the sort of focused reading that now seems so hard to achieve. Even if you’re shaped by a lifetime of reading, as most of my readers are, we have become “skimmers” – readers who absorb an enormous amount of content from myriad sources, often missing out on comprehension and contemplation. I have bucked that trend and still “deep read”, consuming about 3 books a month.

In a landmark 2018 study, Pablo Delgado and Ladislao Salmerón tested what is known as the “screen inferiority effect” – and discovered that readers of a printed text were better able to reduce their mind-wandering than readers who accessed the same text on a computer. This, and similar research, confirms what many readers know from our own experience: we tend to skim when we read on screens, but our attention is held far more easily on the printed page.

Of course, few of us are able to abandon smartphones and computer screens. Dr Maryanne Wolf, author of “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” (2018) instead advocates for what she terms “biliteracy” — the ability to both skim-read, especially online, and to return to deep reading. As she said in an interview with Notre Dame magazine this past spring, “It is not a simplistic, binary question of whether we read and think more deeply on screens or books and print. We can absorb information in multiple mediums if we learn how to focus our attention with intention.”

In recent months I have set out to retrain many friends and family and their Twitter-addled brains in order to help them regain the habit of deep reading. I try to make them consume less  and less news – less online drama, less junk reading – and to create a device-free space in each day. And slowly, they have found an ability to concentrate and be fully immersed in a book.  I’ve also noticed they find it easier to follow complex arguments, and to retain a strong visual sense of fictional worlds in contrast to the watery impressions of a book formed by skim-reading.

The American writer Joshua Cohen opened his 2015 novel, “Book of Numbers”, with this grouse: “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.” I’m not sure I’m ready – or able – to follow this instruction at all times: work still involves multiple screens and swift scanning of text. But as with humans, so with books: if you really want a great conversation it pays to turn off the devices.