What's happening to reading?

Paywalls, platforms, and the friction of reading

• Many see paywalls and hostile UX (ads, trackers, hard-to-cancel subs) as a practical barrier to serious reading, especially when even an article about reading is locked.
• Others argue magazines have always needed pay, and that LLM scraping isn’t a justification for free access, though sites simultaneously block humans and allow crawlers.
• Libraries/Libby and paywall bypass tools are cited as workarounds, but the whole experience pushes people toward headlines, social media, and YouTube summaries.

AI, summarization, and new reading workflows

• Older tools like Copernic Summarizer and desktop search are remembered fondly; LLMs are seen as a much more powerful continuation (summaries, “chat with a PDF,” translation help).
• Some use LLMs as study companions (e.g., math texts, foreign-language paragraphs) to check understanding and clarify dense passages, reporting they now read more, not less.
• Others see summarizers as fundamentally missing the point of many works (especially literature, philosophy, poetry): the “point” is in the form, style, and slow accumulation, not just propositional content.
• Concern: summaries can create a false sense of understanding, and “AI slop” then gets laundered into real-world conversations.

Literacy, difficulty, and the Bleak House debate

• A long subthread dissects the study (cited in the article) where university English majors struggle with the opening of Bleak House.
• One side: the passage is relatively straightforward; if English majors can’t parse it, that’s evidence of serious reading-comprehension decline. Archaic terms should be solvable via context or dictionaries.
• Other side: the test conflates literacy with historical/literary background knowledge and performance reading aloud; unfamiliar 19th‑century context, idiom, and symbolism make the task less about “plain reading.”
• Further critique: literature teaching often implies there’s one “correct” interpretation; students learn to game teachers’ expectations (SparkNotes, AI) rather than develop genuine close-reading skills.

Changing habits: from deep reading to ambient media

• Multiple anecdotes: childhoods in pre- or low-media environments (Eastern Bloc) were saturated with books; now, kids gravitate almost entirely to phones and video and rarely read for pleasure.
• Idioms and cultural references (“cutting leaves for the dogs,” Michaelmas term) don’t land with non-readers, visibly affecting comprehension and shared culture.
• Several note they now read many more words (emails, chats, feeds) but far fewer books; some blame attention fragmentation and “clickbait longform” that buries the thesis in meandering narrative.

What’s at stake: experience vs gist, canon vs customization

• A recurring theme: reading isn’t just extracting “the point” but building large, intricate mental models and imaginative worlds over time; that cognitive workout is hard to replace with audio, video, or summaries.
• Some fear a future of hyper-personalized AI-generated texts will further erode shared canons and common reference points, accelerating cultural fragmentation. Others welcome multiple modalities if they pull more people into contact with ideas at all.