Someone declares the book dead about once every eighteen months. It’s become a kind of cultural ritual, like predicting the end of the world or announcing that rock music is finished. A think piece appears. It cites declining attention spans, the rise of TikTok, the dominance of streaming, the fact that teenagers would rather watch a ninety-second video than read a novel. Concerned intellectuals nod along. Twitter erupts. A few days later, everyone forgets about it and goes back to whatever they were doing.

Meanwhile, books keep selling. In 2021, print book sales in the United States hit 825 million units. That was the highest number since tracking began in 2004. Let me say that again: more physical books were sold in 2021 than in any year on record. Not ebooks. Not audiobooks. Printed, bound, hold-in-your-hands books. The thing that’s supposedly dying set a sales record.

I’ve been in publishing for a while now, and I’ve lived through at least four distinct waves of “the book is dead” panic. The first one I remember clearly was the arrival of the Kindle in 2007. Amazon’s e-reader was going to destroy print the way the iPod destroyed the CD. It seemed plausible at the time. The Kindle was sleek, convenient, and it could hold thousands of books. Why would anyone want a physical object when they could have a library in their pocket?

The ebook did, in fact, grow rapidly for a few years. Between 2008 and 2014, ebook market share climbed steadily, and there were genuine reasons to worry if you were invested in print. But then something happened that the doomsayers didn’t predict: ebook sales plateaued. They didn’t collapse, but they stopped growing. Meanwhile, print sales stabilized and then started climbing again. By 2016, it was clear that ebooks and print were going to coexist, not that one would devour the other.

The second wave came with the rise of social media, around 2012 or so. The argument went something like this: people are spending all their time on Facebook and Twitter, they’re reading tweets instead of novels, long-form reading is being replaced by short-form scrolling. There was some truth to the attention-span concern, and I don’t want to dismiss it entirely. But the prediction that social media would kill books turned out to be exactly backward. Social media, particularly Instagram and later TikTok, became one of the most powerful book-marketing tools in history. BookTok alone has driven millions of sales. The very platform that was supposed to replace reading ended up promoting it.

Wave three was the audiobook surge, starting around 2015. Audiobooks were growing at double-digit rates year over year, and the fear was that people would stop reading altogether and just listen. This one always struck me as particularly odd, because listening to a book is still engaging with a book. The content is the same. The author’s words are the same. The format is different, sure, but I’ve never understood the argument that consuming a novel through your ears is somehow inferior to consuming it through your eyes. If audiobooks bring more people to more stories, that’s a win for everyone. And in practice, research has consistently shown that audiobook listeners also buy print books. They’re not replacing one format with another; they’re using both.

The current wave, wave four if you’re counting, is the AI and short-form video panic. ChatGPT will write all the books. Nobody reads anymore because they’re watching Reels. Why would anyone sit down with a 300-page novel when they can get a summary in thirty seconds? I have thoughts about all of this, and some of them are less charitable than others.

Let me start with AI. Yes, large language models can generate text that looks like a book. They can produce a 60,000-word document in minutes. They can mimic style, follow genre conventions, and even construct something resembling a plot. But here’s what they can’t do: they can’t have an experience. They can’t sit at a kitchen table at two in the morning, struggling to find the right word for how it felt when their father left. They can’t draw on twenty years of living in a particular place, knowing its rhythms and textures and contradictions. They can’t make the specific, weird, deeply personal choices that turn competent prose into something that matters. AI-generated books exist, and they will continue to exist, and most of them will be forgotten instantly because they have nothing to say.

The short-form video argument is more interesting to me, because I think it contains a kernel of legitimate concern wrapped in a lot of generational hand-wringing. Yes, attention spans are under pressure. Yes, it’s harder to sit still with a book when your phone is buzzing every three minutes. But this isn’t a new problem. Television was supposed to destroy reading. Radio before that. Movies before that. Every new medium that competes for human attention triggers the same fear, and every time, books survive. They survive because they offer something that no other medium can replicate.

What is that something? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I don’t think it’s as simple as “books are better.” They’re not better. They’re different. A great film can move you in ways a book never will. A piece of music can reach emotional depths that prose can’t touch. But a book does something unique: it creates a private, collaborative hallucination between the writer and the reader. When you read a novel, the images in your head are yours. The voice of the narrator sounds the way you imagine it. The rooms, the faces, the weather, all of it is constructed by your mind from the author’s instructions. No two people read the same book the same way. That kind of intimate, personalized experience doesn’t exist in any other medium, and no amount of technological innovation can replace it.

I also think the “death of the book” narrative ignores the materiality of books in a way that’s almost willfully blind. Books are objects. Beautiful, tactile, displayable objects. People like owning them. People like looking at them on shelves. People like the smell of them, which I know sounds cliched, but it’s true. There’s a reason bookstores are thriving while other retail categories are struggling. People want to walk into a room full of books, pick them up, and take them home. That desire hasn’t diminished. If anything, it’s intensified as more of our lives have moved to screens. Physical books have become a kind of refuge from the digital, a deliberate choice to slow down and engage with something that doesn’t ping or update or autoplay.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve seen this firsthand. Our print sales have grown every year since we started. Ebook sales have been steady but not spectacular. And the readers who love our books, the ones who write us emails and show up at fairs and post photos of their bookshelves, are overwhelmingly print readers. They want the object. They want to fold down the corner of a page (I know, I know, some of you are screaming about bookmarks right now, and I respect that, but I’m a corner-folder and I’m not ashamed). They want to lend the book to a friend. They want to see it on the nightstand.

There’s another dimension to this that doesn’t get enough attention: independent bookstores are growing. According to the American Booksellers Association, the number of independent bookstores in the US has roughly doubled since 2009. Doubled. During a period when everyone was supposedly done with physical books, more stores dedicated to selling them opened their doors. Some of these stores are tiny, specialized operations. Some are community gathering spaces with reading rooms and event calendars. All of them exist because there is demand for physical books, sold by people who know about books, in spaces that celebrate books.

I want to push back on the attention-span argument a bit more, because I think it’s both partially true and profoundly misleading. It’s true that many people find it harder to concentrate on long texts than they did twenty years ago. I include myself in that group. I have to actively manage my reading environment: phone in another room, no browser tabs open, maybe some music that doesn’t have words. But the fact that concentration requires more effort doesn’t mean people have stopped being willing to make the effort. It means the effort is more intentional. And intentional reading might actually be better reading. When you choose to sit down with a book in spite of all the other things competing for your attention, you’re making a decision about what you value. That’s not a sign of a dying medium. That’s a sign of a medium that people actively choose.

The data backs this up in interesting ways. Book sales are up, but so is the amount of time people spend on their phones. These two facts coexist without contradiction. People are not simple creatures who can only do one thing. The same person who watches three hours of TikTok on Tuesday might spend Saturday afternoon reading a novel. The same teenager who hasn’t touched a book all semester might devour an entire series over winter break. Reading behavior is lumpy and unpredictable, and the aggregate numbers suggest that the lumpiness averages out to a lot of books being read.

I’m also skeptical of the premise that reading was ever as widespread as the nostalgia suggests. People love to invoke a golden age of literacy, usually located sometime in the mid-twentieth century, when everyone supposedly read serious literature and discussed it over dinner. This golden age is largely fictional. Plenty of people in 1955 never read a book. Plenty of households didn’t own one. Mass-market paperbacks were considered lowbrow trash by the literary establishment. The idea that we’ve fallen from some great height of reading culture is a myth that says more about our anxieties than about historical reality.

What has changed, genuinely, is the competitive environment for human attention. A person in 1985 had a handful of TV channels, the radio, newspapers, and magazines. A person in 2024 has infinite scrolling feeds, on-demand streaming, podcasts, video games, group chats, and a device in their pocket that can deliver all of it simultaneously. In that context, the fact that books are holding their own is remarkable. It’s not a story of decline. It’s a story of persistence against extraordinary odds.

I’ll share a personal observation. Every time someone tells me that nobody reads anymore, I ask them what they’ve read recently. Almost without exception, they can name at least one book they’ve read or are reading. The person who just declared the death of reading is, themselves, a reader. They’re just projecting a fear about “other people” onto a trend that doesn’t actually exist. It’s a peculiar form of cultural anxiety that has very little basis in evidence.

Now, I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture. The publishing industry has real problems. Consolidation has reduced the number of major publishers. Midlist authors struggle to earn a living. Advances are down for most writers. Bookstores, while growing in number, face constant pressure from Amazon’s pricing power. The supply chain is fragile, as we learned painfully in 2021. These are legitimate challenges that deserve serious attention.

But those are problems of the industry, not of the medium. The book, as a form, as a technology, as a way of transmitting complex ideas and stories from one mind to another, is doing fine. It has survived the printing press replacing scribes, the paperback replacing the hardcover, television replacing radio, the internet replacing everything. It will survive TikTok and AI and whatever comes next, because it fills a need that nothing else can fill.

I think about this every time I hold a finished copy of a new book we’ve published. The weight of it, the smell of the ink, the way the spine cracks slightly the first time you open it. This object has been predicted obsolete for decades, and yet here it is, still warm from the printer, still carrying someone’s story into the world. Reports of its death, to borrow a phrase, have been greatly exaggerated. Again. And probably will be again next year. And the year after that.

In the meantime, we’ll keep publishing. We’ll keep printing. We’ll keep believing that a well-made book, one with something real to say and the craft to say it well, will find its readers. It always has. I see no reason to think it will stop now.