If you haven’t yet encountered the cover story for the August issue of The Atlantic, I have some bad news to share: "The End of Reading Is Here." It’s an intentionally provocative headline for a slightly less provocative story; while it may portend doom, Rose Horowitch’s piece makes a smaller claim than its headline. She speaks more of a “decline of reading,” and, in a nod to Marshall McLuhan, argues that the U.S. is “postliterate.” Certainly there are crises well-covered within the piece that represent real challenges to readers today: attacks on our capacity for attention, metrics that show marked declines in reading comprehension, the impacts of generative AI on readers and reading, and more.
But The Atlantic's framing places it firmly in a tradition with which the still-existing reading public is all too familiar: the piece proclaiming the demise of books and reading, and the devastating effects of that demise for the world we live in. The writer Trevor Aleo identified this trend in his response to Horowitch, calling her entry “the Platonic form of pearl-clutching clickbait about the decline of reading.” A smattering of her predecessors, all from the last couple of years, include Tyler Cowen proclaiming “Goodbye to the Age of the Book” at The Free Press; James Marriott declaring “The dawn of the post-literate society” in a viral piece on his Substack (Marriott is also about to release a book on the topic: The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society); and Beth McMurtrie with “Is This the End of Reading?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Horowitch herself has been productive in the past writing in similar veins, with pieces like “How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” and “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Many of these pieces engage with real issues, but tend to use those issues to advance a doom narrative that both flatters the reader for being one of the few people left who can follow an argument at length, and presents the situation as essentially beyond hope.
There’s much that can and should be said about this onslaught of post-literate panic, but it’s also worth noting who is and isn’t being asked to contribute to the conversation. Notably absent from these essays is one group of people who might have real insight into the situation: booksellers. The prognosticators wring their hands over the demise of reading, but ignore those whose very livelihood depends on the selling of books. Perhaps they might have something to say on the subject.
Fernando Flores, a bookseller and writer here in Austin, Texas, specifically called out the omission of booksellers from Horowitch’s article. He pointed out on Instagram how often booksellers are excluded from this genre of piece, and how different the reality he sees at Alienated Majesty Books is from what’s being presented.
“I've been a bookseller at the same building since 2014 here in Austin, and I have no reason to feel hopeless,” Flores told me later. “The culture of readers here is bigger than ever, with readers interested in the underground, the translated, the texts that demand the most out of one's attention.” Flores’s observation was echoed by every one of the 21 booksellers I spoke to in the course of my reporting.
It’s also backed up by the fact that new bookstores keep opening at a rate that defies the end-of-reading narrative. According to the American Booksellers Association’s annual report at the end of 2025, 605 bookstore businesses (basically, any store whose primary goal is to sell books, be they pop-ups, online stores, or traditional storefronts) opened last year, compared to just 65 that closed. The number of new stores is up 87 percent from the same metric in 2024.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that all those businesses are thriving once they open, and bookselling is a notoriously difficult industry in which to find and sustain success, in part due to the hellish margins bookstores make on book sales. But such a high volume of new stores does, at the very least, tell a story of energy and excitement around books, of a need and desire in communities that prospective bookstore owners are trying to meet, of a hunger for reading and all the communal benefits that come with spaces devoted to the practice.
“An explosion in business accounts doesn’t necessarily mean an explosion in readership, but the visibility matters,” said Spencer Ruchti, who manages author events at Third Place Books in Seattle. “Distribution matters. Communities or neighborhoods that once didn’t have easy access to literature now have that access—and that availability will have a serious impact on readers for years to come.”
Talk to enough booksellers and you’ll find that it’s nearly impossible to square their experience with the despair about the state of reading that these pieces often leave you with. Matt and Megan Bormet opened People’s Book in Takoma Park, Md., in 2023, and shared a bit with me about what they’ve experienced since then. “We opened our store three years ago and had no idea whether anyone would show up when we opened our doors,” Matt said. “We sold about 60,000 books last year (for context, that’s three times the population of our city), and I really don’t know what I’m doing.” He told me later, “We just filled a very obvious need in the community, and people started knocking the doors down.”
Emerson Perper worked for many years at Curious Iguana in Frederick, Md., and now manages The Head and the Hand, a bookstore in Philadelphia. “Every year, at each store, profits, event attendance, and foot traffic increase,” they told me. “It’s not the same number of people spending more and more money. There are more people.”
Tom Ianelli has worked as a street bookseller in Brooklyn for the last five years, operating under the name Peter Books on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg; he regularly interviews readers at his stand, and shares the interviews on his Instagram. “I have felt nothing but positivity about readers in my community,” he told me. Ianelli shared a story that serves as a microcosm of the type of generative work for reading that booksellers are doing every day, all across the country:
“A kid, probably 16, came up and said he never reads but really wanted to start but had no idea where to begin. I saw myself in him so I gave him Dharma Bums for free, and he came back two hours later, smiling in near disbelief because he liked it so much. He said he had read 20 pages and couldn't wait to read more. That's a beautiful book and really easy to read! And if he reads that, I am sure he will read more. These interactions, these books, they are evidence that we are so much more well-connected to each other and the past than these articles want to make us feel.”
Of course booksellers, by definition, will mostly be encountering those who still buy books, so it makes sense that their outlook is rosier than some. But what of the broader claim that the nation is experiencing a reading crisis of some sort? Most of the people I spoke with did not dispute that there is a problem, but the nature of the crisis looks very different from the perspective of the bookseller. “I do believe we are in a crisis of reading in the U.S.,” said Kris Kleindienst, who has been working as a bookseller for 52 years and owns Left Bank Books in St. Louis. “But I believe it is only part of a larger crisis that is equal parts unfettered corporate greed and unfettered fascism. You can’t address a reading crisis in a vacuum.”
Jazzi McGilbert owns Reparations Club in Los Angeles, which opened shortly before the pandemic and has since become one of the most beloved black-owned bookstores in the country. She identified a number of causes for the reading crisis that you won’t find in the pieces of the post-literate prognosticators. “I agree there is a literacy crisis in this country, and it’s important to acknowledge that plainly," she said. "It's not just ‘brain rot,’ it’s the intentional, predictable result of decades of divestment in public education, libraries, class warfare, attacks on books in general, overworked and under-resourced parents, and an attention economy incentivizing us all to keep consuming without thinking.”
Brad Johnson, one of the owners of East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, similarly identified very different causes from what you typically see in these pieces. “The more immediate crises are both the most easily apprehended and theoretically responded to," he said. "By that I mean there is an inaccessibility crisis with regard to books—most obviously and perniciously via bans, but also via marketing and editorial decisions by publishers.” According to Johnson, “the onus for that crisis is on pretty specific actions and intentions, and not strictly or even primarily some sort of ‘cultural’ drift.”
Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., where he has worked since 2004. He’s also the author of the invaluable The Art of Libromancy, which is essential reading if you’d like deeper insight into the world of books and reading today from the perspective of the bookseller. Cook identified a couple of chief causes behind the reading crisis we face: “The Religious Right’s decades-long attack on public education that has long used book bans and challenges as a primary tactic that now has major support at every level of our government, and an economy that makes the production and distribution of books incredibly difficult by funneling all of the money away from writers and readers to the ownership class.” Cook said that this “now includes the outright theft of copyrighted material to train computer programs intended to put writers out of work. If you aren’t acknowledging those systemic attacks on literary culture, it’s hard for me to muster any enthusiasm for your arguments about apps and young people.” Book bans, decisions made by profit-driven publishers, attacks on public education, defunding of public libraries, the greed at the heart of our economy—rarely do these threats to reading get mentioned in the flourishing genre of essays about the death of literacy.
“I don’t think people have simply lost interest in reading,” said Katy Lemieux, one of the co-owners of Talking Animals Books, which is part of the post-pandemic explosion of new bookstores, opening in Grapevine, Texas, in 2023. “I think we’ve built a culture that leaves very little room for it.”
Interestingly, the sense of alienation that so many people are experiencing today, the mental toll of life in our technologically determined society, the crises of attention that so many death-of-literacy pieces dine out on—these are often the very forces that booksellers identify as driving the growth of their stores. The end for the prognosticators is often the beginning for the booksellers, who are ready and eager to open new doors. Greg Kornbluh, who opened Downbound Books in Cincinnati in 2019, told me a story that spoke to this particularly well. “Nearly two years ago we started our first book club here, and we gave it a pretty specific remit: Anti-Despair Book Club," he said. "The idea was to pick books—both fiction and non—that would do more than just distract or comfort, but that could actually provide some tools or models for how to face the hardships and alienation of our times. What became apparent, though, was that the nature of the books didn't actually matter nearly as much as the way they served to bring people together. Just the act of reading together, in other words, was the bulwark against despair and alienation that so many of us were seeking.”
In the same vein, Brad Johnson spoke to the way these forces are “compelling people to be physically—if they're able—more present in their daily lives. My hope is that if people are increasingly alienated, they are also increasingly motivated to short-circuit that feeling when and as they can. I think that people are finding an outlet in the immediacy of places that invite unmediated curiosity—places like bookstores.”
At the heart of this development is the physical space itself, which many bookstores across the country are using as gathering spaces for their community as much as they are spaces for the displaying and selling of books. Radical bookstores using their space for organizing, queer and black-owned bookstores operating as hubs for their communities—this is nothing new. For many bookselling communities, the physical space of a bookstore has never been just a site for retail. But perhaps more than ever, bookstores across the country are taking on that role in their community.
“From where I sit, bookstores are thriving precisely because they’ve adapted," Lemieux said. "Successful indies aren’t just retail stores anymore; they’re community spaces. We host book clubs, author events, children’s programming, writing workshops, and conversations that simply can’t happen online. People aren’t just coming in to purchase a book, they’re coming to belong to a literary community.”
Kar Johnson, the event coordinator at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, had a similar argument. “It is in our best interest to use the physical space of the store as a gathering point tied into and beyond the selling of books.” There’s a tried-and-true bookselling strategy to that—if you can get people in the door, they may buy books they didn’t intend to buy—but Johnson also spoke of it as part of how the store conceives of its obligation to its community. Speaking of events hosted by Green Apple that are not “tied directly to a book,” they pointed out, “there is an undeniable connection between reading and understanding the need for compassion and advocacy in the world. If we have the space to facilitate that, I feel we should. Our community really responds to such things, and it makes them want to spend more time in our store, and we get to establish relationships with one another.”
Across the country, in part due to the eagerness of booksellers to use their space in service to their community, the influence of bookstores is growing, not shrinking. What does that have to do with reading itself? For many of these stores, the mission includes helping people reengage with reading at a time when doing so is more difficult than ever. Chantel McCray, a bookseller at Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, pointed this out. “Many readers are increasingly aware of how digital distractions affect their attention," McCray said. "I think this has changed what readers are looking for when they come into bookstores. They’re often looking not just for a book, but for help slowing down, discovering something unexpected, and reconnecting with the pleasure of sustained attention. It’s our job to help them do that.”
McGilbert also spoke of the way booksellers are reconceptualizing their jobs to meet the moment. “We definitely see decreased attention spans and an increase in overwhelm and shame. Everyone seems to know doomscrolling has flattened everything and they know they’re overwhelmed. They come in because they want the full spectrum of their brains back. That changes our job as booksellers. We have to lower the social barrier without lowering our intellectual standards. We have to ask better questions, make unexpected connections, and help people find an entry point.” If it’s the case that our larger culture offers fewer and fewer entry points for prospective readers, then bookstores playing a larger role in their communities may be exactly what’s required to push in the opposite direction.
So, the end of reading? Forget the headline and go set foot in a bookstore. Watch the “kids who shyly bring books to the cash register on a beautiful summer day, only to leave the bookstore and bound through the parking lot, hugging their new purchases, when they think no one is looking” (Ruchti). Cherish the vital work of booksellers helping “people who haven’t read a novel in years rediscover the habit because someone handed them exactly the right book” (Lemieux), the bookstores “giving people what they need to live a full life through books and reading” (Cook). If the doom narrative of the prognosticators is getting to you and the future of reading feels precarious, make a choice to support the bookstores where reading is bedrock; where the end of reading just means you’ve finished a book and are sitting in the place of quiet it has left you, not yet thinking about what you’ll pick up next.
