[waserwill]

I'm not sure what sort of data could support this, but I'll just say this: there is a difference between reading quantity and quality. I'm merely echoing greater critics, but the quantity of books sold says little about their quality (markets see books as commodities and try to make make profit rather than spreading good literature, and this is understandable). Plus, judging by the number of unread books on my shelf, buying a book doesn't mean reading it. There is an aesthetic appeal to books, and though I want to read all I own, there will inevitably be books printed and sold but unread.

There are high literacy rates, but this says little about whether material has been grasped and digested. References to classics (e.g. in the English tradition, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens) or even religious texts (e.g. Exodus) are rarely recognized, in my experience. Given how freely great orators of the recent past drew from these (e.g. the speeches of MLK Jr.), this is surprising.

[gmadsen]

purely anecdotally to my own experience, but I firmly believe that not only social media, but the screen size of phones themselves incentivize fast context switching shallow low quality reading, which has detrimental effects on cognition. Sure everyone has the worlds knowledge in their pocket, but all incentives are to only consume the lowest quality of knowledge

If I don't make it a daily habit, it becomes difficult to read a novel, I am unable to maintain the attention required, which phone scrolling im sure has exacerbated.