What's Happening to Reading?

What do you read, and why? Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing industry, in the nineteenth century. In a 2017 Shouts & Murmurs titled "Before the Internet," the writer Emma Rathbone captured the spirit of reading as it used to be: "Before the Internet, you could laze around on a park bench in Chicago reading some Dean Koontz, and that would be a legit thing to do and no one would ever know you had done it unless you told them." Reading was just reading, and no matter what you chose to read--the paper, Proust, "The Power Broker"--you basically did it by moving your eyes across a page, in silence, at your own pace and on your own schedule. Today, the nature of reading has shifted.