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Why the End of Reading Is Not the End of the Story

6,000 years ago, the invention of writing separated the message from the messenger. And almost six hundred years ago, Johannes Gutenberg had his eureka moment while looking at a wine press: perhaps the same principle could be used to transfer letters onto paper. Since then, the world has never been the same.

The single great invention of the printing press unleashed an entire wave of further innovations. Historians connect the explosion of literacy in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, the emergence of human rights, the advent of democracy and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

Reading is the cultural technique of modernity. Since the birth of the printing press, it has hardly had to change. We read letters printed on paper and bound between covers. Then came the internet. Never before has it been so easy to access and share information. And today, artificial intelligence produces texts at an astonishing pace and answers virtually any question we might have — without requiring us to search for a source, let alone read it.

The Reading Crisis

Reading proficiency is declining. People may still possess the basic skills of reading and writing, but when confronted with longer texts, many struggle to understand the connections between ideas. The latest PISA results show student performance at historic lows across all areas and around the world — largely regardless of a country’s education policy, immigration policy or school system.

Universities are affected, too. Lecturers report having drastically reduced the amount of reading required in their courses. Entire books are rarely read anymore. Instead, students turn to excerpts, summaries and updated versions.

There is a paradox here: if we add up emails, social media posts, news tickers, advertising messages and the like, we probably read more words per day today than ever before. But most of these are fragments of text and compressed messages.

Of course, people are not forgetting how to decipher individual words. What is disappearing are the higher-order skills required to understand texts and synthesize information into a coherent whole.

What role will reading play in the future? As we move into a world dominated by screens, are we also entering — or regressing into — a post-literate age governed by emotion and alarmism?

Keep Calm and Read on.

Is it really a problem if we read less? Neuroscience is clear: yes.

If we only decipher written language at the level of words and sentences, we cannot use it independently. First we learn to read; then we read in order to learn. The more complex and multifaceted the world becomes, the more essential it is to construct a coherent picture from countless individual pieces of information. And that requires background knowledge. It requires having read widely.

Books and the internet have never offered the same reading experience. The rise of social media has structurally amplified the difference. Constant push notifications, Slack messages, TikToks, Reels and memes keep our brains in a permanent state of heightened attention, filling up our cognitive capacity and leaving little room for extended periods of concentration.

Our brains have adapted to the least efficient mode as the default. And that does not come without consequences.

What Happens in the Brain When We Read

Learning to read is one of the most dramatic transformations the human brain can undergo. Children who learn to read develop specialized regions of the brain that did not previously exist. People who read exhibit measurably different brain structures from those who do not.

But when we fill our time with short videos instead of books, the complex cognitive abilities that reading cultivates begin to erode. The brain retains what it practices.

For the brain, it makes a difference whether we read non-fiction or novels, fact or fiction. Neuroscientific findings show that reading and social cognition draw on the same neural network: the Default Mode Network, which simulates hypothetical scenes, spaces and mental states. People who read a great deal of fiction show the strongest performance in social cognition.

So it is not reading itself that makes us more social.
It is the story within it.

And it is the new worlds we allow ourselves to enter. Only sustained immersion in a text stimulates critical thinking and self-reflection in ways that skimming and reading in short bursts cannot.

The Countertrends

It should therefore come as no surprise that the strongest countertrend to the decline of reading is emerging precisely from narrative literature. The proportion of people in Germany who said they had read a book in the previous twelve months fell from 43 percent in 2021 to 31 percent in 2025 (see Brandt 2025). Yet four percent of readers are avid readers, spending at least eleven hours a week reading (see Amlinger et al. 2026).

Reading is increasingly becoming a niche hobby. But this niche is more intense than ever. Young women devouring books are driving much of the growth in genre fiction, above all in romance and romantasy. Under hashtags such as #BookTok and #BookLovers, digital content has emerged around the offline hobby of reading: book recommendations, photographs of beautifully designed bookshelves arranged by colour, self-written fan fiction. Entire publishing divisions have specialized in New Adult and romantasy fiction, while bookshops now dedicate shelves and display tables to these genres.

• Writer Naomi Alderman has launched a “Couch to 5K” for reading on her Substack — an eight-week programme designed to establish reading as an everyday habit, with weekly goals and group reading sessions on Zoom.
• German comedian Moritz Neumeier reads and discusses books with his community on his Instagram channel “momothek3000”.
• Singer Dua Lipa shares monthly reading recommendations through her digital book club, “Service95”, along with exclusive interviews with herself and authors.
• The Silent Book Club, with its slogan “Welcome to introvert happy hour”, has become a global community with more than 2,200 local chapters in 70 countries. Its motto: Bring your own book. Above all, it is about the pleasure of reading.
• In summer 2025, a 30-metre-long pop-up library made from IKEA Billy bookcases — the “Billyothèque” — appeared along the Seine in Paris.
• In German cities, public book-sharing cabinets on street corners have become part of the urban landscape. Since 2026, libraries have also been allowed to open on Sundays.
• Singapore has recently started paying its citizens to read. An app allows Singaporeans to track a 15-minute reading session each day, earning 20 coins for each session. 1,000 coins can be exchanged for one Singapore dollar. The government’s stated goal: less doomscrolling, more reading as a healthy habit.

Countertrends often emerge as a response to experiences of frustration — and frustration with constant digital stimulation has now become collective. On the one hand, we are often drawn towards the path of least cognitive resistance. And we find it in endless scrolling. But the resulting sensory overload, with little meaningful benefit for everyday life, is exhausting for the brain. Websites and feeds built around endless scrolling operate on a neurological level much like slot machines. They constantly generate new expectations without ever providing an endpoint. And that is precisely what leaves us feeling empty.

Real reward works differently. It emerges where effort is involved. Research into flow shows that frictionlessness does not make us happy. Only the right amount of challenge creates the state that people experience as fulfilling. Reading and scrolling have one thing in common: in both cases, we can easily lose track of time, with hours seeming to fly by. But while one often leaves us frustrated, we can put down a book feeling deeply fulfilled — and continue to draw nourishment from the story we immersed ourselves in for days afterwards.

In the End, the Story Remains

So what survives the transition into the post-literate age — a transition we are undoubtedly experiencing? Something older than writing and younger than any medium: the story.

• It is no coincidence that fiction, in particular, strengthens social cognition and empathy.
• It is no coincidence that children come to reading through stories, not through arguments.
• And it is no coincidence that the movement currently reigniting interest in reading is a romance and fantasy movement, rather than a non-fiction movement.

When even the Pope quotes Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in an encyclical, we may safely conclude: the era of management literature is over.

We are turning back towards the great stories.

How do we become excited about books again?
Through stories.

How do we communicate information?
Through narratives.

How do we make the future imaginable again?
By telling stories about it.

What we are really missing is not reading time. It is constructive narratives that enchant us and give us confidence.

Reading will continue to matter. Not because it is the superior technology. But because we are more capable when we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes, tolerate complexity and follow a line of thought that is not our own.

And the key to all of this is reading.