the era of reading books coming to an endart & design•4w ago

i’ve started to think that nowadays people are gradually stopping reading books. if you try to count the people around you who actually read, they wouldn’t exceed the fingers of one hand. because reading books no longer feels necessary the way it once did. access to information is far easier than in the past. when there are such fast and simple ways to obtain knowledge, spending hours slowly digesting a 400-page text no longer appeals to the modern person. with podcasts, online documentaries, and ai tools that answer any question within seconds, hardly anyone shows interest in novels invented by 19th-century writers or academic works that have lost their relevance. we’ve practically stopped writing, too. sure, some academic material is still produced, but even there we rely on ai having it summarize things and then reading the condensed version. information that might take you 300 pages to reach in an academic book can now be accessed through short instagram and tiktok reels. technology’s biggest contribution, arguably, has been freeing us from the burden of reading books. the book has become little more than a photographic object. anything that fails to keep up with the spirit of the age is doomed to disappear.