One book in three weeks? At some universities that would be a triumph
At the London Book Fair earlier this month, Joanna Prior, chief executive of Pan Macmillan and chair of the National Literacy Trust, warned that the decline in reading poses a greater threat to the publishing industry than artificial intelligence (AI) ever could.
She cited University of Oxford professor Jonathan Bate’s observation that university students who once read three books a week now struggle to finish one in three weeks. The audience was shocked. I was not. I thought to myself: one book in three weeks is still a lot of books for some of the students I know.
The rest of the book fair was consumed by a different anxiety: whether machines will soon write the books. Panel after panel debated AI and copyright, AI and authorship, AI and the future of the creative industries. Prior cut through all of it with a single observation: it does not matter who writes the books if nobody is reading them. The UK publishing industry is worth £7 billion but it contracted by 3 per cent in 2024. Meanwhile audiobook sales have more than doubled since 2019, suggesting that even those who still consume books are increasingly unwilling to read them.
The conversation about the reading crisis in higher education has so far been dominated by voices from elite institutions. Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia. These are universities where the expectation of extensive reading was, until recently, taken for granted. When their professors report a decline, it makes headlines. But the headlines are missing the deeper story, which is that at many universities outside the Russell Group, the situation is not one of decline. It is one of absence.
Warren Buckland, associate professor in film studies at Oxford Brookes University and a colleague of mine, puts it plainly: the vast majority of undergraduate students do not read at all now – although AI has worsened the situation, with students relying on simplistic summaries and artificial, repetitive prose that merely restates the same ideas over and over again. Getting them to write in their own voice is near impossible. He is clear that this is not primarily about AI, although AI has worsened the situation. It is the consequence of years of social media consumption and, for the current cohort, the disruption of Covid during their formative school years. “They don't actually understand at all why reading is important,” he says.
Noreen Giffney at Ulster University has had a similar experience. Her students, she says, seem quite capable of creating and reading images. The written word, as a medium of sustained thought, has simply dropped out of their lives.
The statistics bear this out beyond the lecture hall. In the UK, only one in three children enjoy reading in their free time, and half of all adults have stopped reading altogether. Daily reading to children aged nought to five has dropped 25 per cent since 2019. Internationally the picture is no better. In the US, 40 per cent of adults did not read a single book in 2025. Among those with a high school education or less, the median number of books read was zero. Among those with postgraduate degrees, the median was five. A quarter of young adults aged 16 to 24 are functionally illiterate despite having earned a high school diploma.
As reported in Times Higher Education, since January Sweden has required its universities to track and report the use of course literature after the government concluded that years of replacing books with digital devices in classrooms had contributed to a sharp decline in reading comprehension. The government has reversed its digitalisation strategy in schools and invested €104 million (£90 million) in returning physical books to classrooms. It is a blunt instrument, and researchers at Örebro University have questioned whether the crisis is quite as severe as ministers suggest. But at least Sweden is treating the problem as structural rather than as a matter of individual student motivation. In the UK, we are not even at the stage of acknowledging there is a structure to examine.
But here is what troubles me most. When I spoke informally to a number of academics at Russell Group universities, they told me their students still seem to be reading and writing just fine. “They know they need to gain these basic academic skills to succeed in life,” said Diana Jeater at the University of Liverpool. “I asked my students to do an exercise using AI and they were not happy to use it at all, as if this was a possible infectious disease that could spread without them realising it.” The reading crisis, it appears, might not be evenly distributed. It maps on to the same lines that have always divided British higher education: class, privilege and the schools that students attended before they arrived.
If this is the case, we are not simply witnessing a generational shift in attention. We are witnessing the widening of a gap that nobody at the London Book Fair, and very few people in higher education policy, are talking about. The post-92 universities, the former polytechnics, the institutions that serve the majority of UK students, are experiencing something qualitatively different from what Oxford and Cambridge are experiencing. At one end, students read less than they used to. At the other, students do not read at all. These are not the same problem, and they do not have the same solution.
Are we drifting towards the world Kazuo Ishiguro imagined in his futuristic novel Klara and the Sun? A society split between the “lifted” children who receive education and every cognitive advantage, and those left behind, watched with gentle incomprehension by machines more attentive than any human teacher. In Ishiguro’s novel, it is a society that has lost any ethical compass, where education is reserved for a select few, governed in part by corrupted notions of genetic advantage. Access to a life shaped by reading, by sustained thought, by the pleasure of wrestling with difficult ideas, is becoming a privilege rather than a right. And AI will deepen this divide further, not because it is dangerous in itself, but because it offers the perfect shortcut for those who were never taught that the long way round was worth taking.
Banning social media or restricting AI in universities is not the answer. What has been lost is something more fundamental: the sense that education can be a source of joy. We have spent decades instrumentalising learning, reducing it to outcomes, metrics and employability, and we are now bewildered that students approach it as a transaction rather than an adventure.
The terrifying truth is that even some of the privileged ones, the students at the institutions that still appear to be functioning, no longer know what it feels like to read for the sheer pleasure of the encounter. Like in Klara and the Sun, they study because they know education will give them a more powerful position in society.
Prior said in her keynote that we must make books “as urgent as notifications”. That is a fine aspiration for a publishing chief executive. But urgency is not what has been lost. What has been lost is fun. Curiosity. The delight of an idea that changes the shape of your thinking. Somehow we need to reintroduce that into education, and the honest, uncomfortable admission is that nobody quite knows how.
Meanwhile, book fairs carry on debating whether AI will write the next Booker Prize winner. Here is a scenario nobody at Olympia seemed to consider: a future in which books are written by machines and never read by anyone at all, except perhaps by other machines, while a shrinking number of humans remember why reading once mattered in the first place.
Agnieszka Piotrowska is an academic, film-maker and psychoanalytic life coach. She supervises PhD students at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Staffordshire, is a TEDx speaker on AI intimacy and is author of the forthcoming Routledge book AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis.