Why are you reading fewer books?
Because you should be reading fewer books
Last winter, when I was a visiting professor at UATX, I encouraged students to use AI to help them with the books that I assigned. No doubt this shocks some people, who fear that as a society the road to barbarism is paved with a reduction in book-reading. But I stand by my approach.
I now read many fewer books than I did ten years ago. This not because of “the phones.” It is not because I have lost my intellectual mojo. It is because alternative sources of information have become more compelling.
Martin Gurri, who wrote The Revolt of the Public (a book that I did read), pointed out that around the year 2000 the cumulative information on the Internet began to double every year. That is, as much new information was put on the Internet in 2000 as had existed in all years previously. Then again in 2001, in 2002, and so on.
Imagine the total information available on the Internet in 2000 as just one book. By today, there would be over 33 million books on the Internet.
Understood this way, each book that you read represents a much smaller fraction of available information than it did 25 years ago. To me, this implies that I should spend less time reading books and more time reading essays on the Internet. The opportunity cost of reading a book may not be 33 million times what it was 25 years ago, but it has gone way up.
Think in terms of cooking. You may criticize how other people are getting their nourishment these days. But you yourself are not about to spend as much time cooking as your grandparents did.
Similarly, you may criticize how other people get their information. But if books were the same share of your information diet as they were for your grandparents, you would not be happy.
I could have asked my UATX students to read two books a week. But relative to the opportunity cost of their time, this would have been abusive. Instead, I invited them to use AI to help them absorb the ideas that I wanted them to get from reading the books on the reading list. For that purpose, the “vibe-reading” worked.
Assuming I teach there again this winter, I will try to make “vibe-reading” more structured by offering the AI tutor, which can be pasted into Claude. The tutor incorporates some of the ideas that I have found helpful myself when asking an AI to extract important ideas from a book.
I am not saying that you should read zero books. Some books (but not very many) are crafted so well that you should read them to appreciate the author’s style. Other books (again, not very many) are so dense in their content that you can benefit by plowing through them page by page.
But you should not beat yourself up if you find yourself reading fewer books than you used to. It could be that, at the margin, reading essays or having conversations with AI is a better use of your time.
So far, I have been describing nonfiction books. Concerning fiction, the opportunity cost also has gone up. Podcasts and streaming video are new forms of entertainment that are competitive. So is social media. (I know you think that other people are spending too much time on social media, but perhaps they are not as manipulated as you believe.)
New books are appearing all of the time. Older books are still around. But if you are spending less time with books and more time with other media, that does not mean that you are becoming illiterate. Chances are, you are becoming more discerning about how you use your time.
Agree with the basic premise, but just as quickly question which books are we talking about...(?)
Podcasts and streaming filling the space...I'm not convinced. Offhand, I can't think of any podcasts that can't be distilled down to a few salient bullet points, not to mention I think we hit peak podcast a long while back...and streaming, good gawd, please just give me some bullet points. So, I guess we apply the same principles to the pods and streamers, no?
Then what? Personally, I'd enjoy having that newly found extra time to read a few good books.
I think Prof Kling is basically right here.
Ironically, I probably read as many words as I did ten or fifteen years ago — maybe more — but I definitely read fewer books. Especially in nonfiction.
Part of the issue is that many nonfiction books feel overextended now. A great 5,000-word idea gets stretched into 250 pages because that’s what publishing economics rewards. At the other extreme, Twitter/X is usually too fragmented and performative to provide the kind of sustained mental stimulation I actually crave, which is probably why I use it less than I once did.
Substack essays hit a surprisingly good middle ground. A strong essay often contains more intellectual density per minute than the average nonfiction book. In my youth I used to joke that the average person wasn’t as interesting as the average book. Now I’m tempted to say that the average book is not as interesting as the average Substack.
What has really changed things for me, though, is AI.
“Vibe-reading” a book with AI is genuinely enjoyable, but what’s even better is using the book as a jumping-off point for back-and-forth exploration. The book becomes less of a static object and more of a conversational partner. You stop passively consuming and start interrogating ideas, testing assumptions, asking for counterarguments, historical parallels, simplifications, expansions, and synthesis.
Oddly enough, this also works very well with Substack essays. A good essay plus AI discussion often delivers more intellectual value than reading an entire padded book alone.
I don’t think this represents barbarism or intellectual decline. It may simply be an adaptation to an environment where the bottleneck is no longer access to information, but the ability to navigate, compress, interrogate, and synthesize it intelligently.