Books vs. TikToks

 In the latest mailbag post on his blog, Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias starts with a brief (but convincing) refutation of a recent Jacobin article that offers a novel, leftist theory of the root-causes of the present "reading crisis."

There has ben a lot of hand-wringing over the past year about the reported decline in reading for pleasure among twenty-first century Americans. 

I think most of us would say this has a pretty obvious and uninteresting explanation. Reading is hard. It requires more mental effort than watching short-form video content on your phone. And so, most people opt for the latter. Like water running downhill, they take the path of least resistance. 

I don't say this to blame or judge anyone. Even I—who read daily for pleasure—have so far found it impossible to make it through Nicholas Nickleby or Martin Chuzzlewit, even though ordinary nineteenth century readers put away installments of Dickens like they were junk food. 

Lord Byron claims to have read 4,000 novels by the time he was nineteen years old. And while that may have been a slight exaggeration, we have to keep in mind that he was embarrassed, not proud, of this achievement. After all, "novels" at the time were mere "light entertainment." 

It seems like what happened here is therefore pretty easy to explain. Reading just faces a lot more competition from other media, when it comes to keeping people hooked and entertained. We have found more potent and accessible ways than books to stimulate people's dopamine receptors. 

The Jacobin piece Yglesias is responding to, however, apparently had a different theory. They assert that people have stopped reading because books got too expensive; and this—they say—is due in turn to the monopolistic corporate consolidation of the publishing industry. 

Yglesias responds to this argument by pointing out that books—including the greatest works in history—are actually cheaper than ever. I bought a Kindle e-book yesterday, and I was marveling to realize that it's one of the few purchases I regularly make that hasn't been adjusted upward in price in the past year or two (so far as I can remember). 

And if people really do want to tackle all of Martin Chuzzlewit, it is available for free to anyone with an internet connection.

I have to agree with Matt here, then, that price does not seem to be the main barrier. It seems more like an excuse. 

I am reminded of George Orwell's essay "Books vs. Cigarettes." He recalls a quite similar conversation with a group of workers who told him that they don't read for pleasure because books are too expensive. "Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence on a book," they tell him. 

Orwell proceeds to do the math on how much the same speakers are probably spending on cigarettes or day trips or horse races each week, and concludes that it is easily more. He concludes that, if anything, "reading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to the radio probably the cheapest."

This is even more true, to Yglesias's point, in contemporary times, since the widespread availability of free public domain books on the internet has brought the cost of acquiring quality classic literature (at least if you are willing to read things from the 1920s and earlier) to near-zero. 

And so, Orwell concludes, "if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive."

We say the same thing to the Jacobin writers today: if Americans are reading less now than they did in the past, let us at least admit that it is not because people can't afford it, but because reading requires a different and more fatiguing type of mental effort than watching TikToks.