Alix Earle says she’s never read a book. James Daunt keeps opening bookstores. Somewhere between the influencer and the bookseller is an argument about whether Americans have stopped reading or the people writing the obituaries need to visit a Barnes & Noble.

The 74 covered the reaction to Earle’s admission last week. Rose Horowitch, whose Atlantic cover story declared the age of reading over, offered a broader explanation in her PBS interview this summer: cultural and economic power tends to flow to people skilled at the dominant communications medium. Today, influencers can command the attention once reserved for literary figures. A young person can reasonably notice where the rewards are.

The counterargument is in Nathan Heller’s New Yorker profile of Daunt, out yesterday: print book sales are up nearly 25 percent from a decade ago, and the number of independent bookstores has climbed 70 percent since 2020. David Wallace-Wells made a similar point in the Times this summer, questioning the story of reading’s extinction. His reading of federal time-use data puts much of the decline among older Americans.

In ELLE today, Véronique Hyland asks why everyone seems to be reading the same books. BookTok promised endless discovery, but publishers’ marketing budgets, shrinking book-review coverage, and the desire to join a conversation can concentrate readers around a handful of titles. The internet can pull people away from books and send them straight to the bookstore.

Children’s reading habits give us clearer reason to worry. NBC reported in June that the share of 9-year-olds reading for fun almost daily fell from 53 percent in 2012 to 37 percent in 2025; the share of 13-year-olds nearly halved. Carl Hendrick, examining the new PISA results, focuses on students who rush through reading tasks inaccurately. He argues that years of treating texts as vehicles for practicing generic skills have encouraged students to scan for answers rather than stay with what they’re reading, though he concedes the metric records behavior, not ability.

New York teachers describe how books get squeezed out. Nicole Radosti Pipia’s Queens students once read “The Giver” and “Wonder” together; now, she told New York Focus, her school’s reading program leaves no time for novels. Another teacher called her classroom library “purely decorative.” But Emily Aierstok’s seventh graders read eight books last year, the most in her 26-year career, after she gave them more choice and added classroom reading time.

Education Week’s new reporting reaches back to another reason children once picked up books: the personal pan pizza. Olina Banerji examines BOOK IT!-style rewards alongside efforts to provide books and help families build reading routines. Penn’s Amy Stornaiuolo cautions that rewards alone can make reading transactional. The aim is to give children reasons to keep reading after the prize is gone.

And in EdSource today, David Wakelyn describes the instructional work behind Downey Unified’s progress: aligning curriculum, assessments, teacher training, and student support as third-grade English language arts proficiency rose from 41 percent to 56.7 percent over five years. Children need instruction that helps them read successfully, books they want to open, and time to stay with them. Schools have a hand in all three.

— Thomas

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