“In America, the reading of books is up. Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago. The number of independent bookstores in the United States has climbed steeply since 2009, with a seventy-per-cent increase since 2020. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that thirty-eight per cent of American adults read one to five books in 2025, and fourteen per cent read at least twenty. The global book market is expected to grow five per cent annually for the next several years; for the generation now entering college, book sales are at a lifetime high.

In its lament for fading literacy, the Atlantic mentioned current data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose reading survey of thousands of students began in 1971. ‘Just 35 percent of high-school seniors were ‘proficient’ at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument,’ the magazine’s staff writer Rose Horowitch observed. That sounds bad, but the same figure a decade ago was thirty-seven per cent—just two points higher—and in the gloriously unwired age of 1992 it was forty. And the survey’s broad news was good. American nine-year-olds performed much better on reading assessments in 2025 than in 1971, and thirteen-year-olds’ performance held steady. The reading skills of English learners have risen in the past two decades, and, unlike in 1971, the top quarter of Black and Hispanic students today out-read the average white child.”

From The New Yorker.