We’ll always have stories – but it feels like the potency of books is softening

”Life gets in the way”: many of us no longer have the time for books

Is the reading of books falling off a cliff? Are people consuming tomes in the volume they once did? Beyond the tiny, narrow world of Australian letters it feels like there’s a fundamental shift in the way stories are consumed, which means, perhaps, that Australia’s publishing industry is about to be catastrophically affected. I hope I’m wrong.

Of course, the smugly voracious readers among us will be murmuring “stop right there Gemmell, I’m reading as much as ever; my teenage son lives for books, my niece reads a book a week, what idiocy are you talking about?” But my gut feeling is that that the bibliophile is increasingly an outlier amid a wider world of fractured attention spans confronted by endless options for doing something, anything, but sit down with a book. Like binge-watching a streamed show. Or scrolling social media on a phone. Or gaming.

My gut feeling is that consuming a novel may one day become as niche as the devouring of classical music; a world not dying but… shrinking. Perhaps some people, young people in particular, think this of books already. Because for a lot of them the reading of a clump of printed paper doesn’t seem to enter their world now, apart from what teachers are forcing them to read. I look at our wonderful book stores brimming with their delectible enticements and think, but the readers just don’t seem to be there in the volumes they once were. An English teacher of Year Eight and Nine pupils said to me recently, “They don’t read anymore. Is it phones? Their concentration is shot. It’s a marked change in reading habits, it’s like they can’t focus the way they used to.”

I write as a failure of a mother who to my horror hasn’t shaped four voracious readers. They all were, avidly, until about 12, when one by one they ceased their mighty roar for the latest Wimpy or Treehouse. Books, catastrophically, seemed suddenly at the periphery of their world, an encumbrance a teacher wanted dissected for an essay due at midnight. The older ones occasionally devour a flavour-of-the-month blockbuster but don’t breathe books like their parents did. High school, co-incidentally, is when they all got their phones.

Author Michael Winkler weighed in on my bewilderment on Twitter: “I know stacks of intelligent, engaged, creative late teens/early 20s who don’t read novels. Ever. I wonder if some blame should attach to publishers for pushing out safe books rather than wild, risky stuff that might excite non-readers?” Agree. This feels like a time for daring and audacity and risk, for breaking convention to create exciting new ways of narrative for an attention-shot generation. Writer Tim Baker said: “My extremely literate 20 yo daughter, once a voracious reader, says her attention span has dramatically shrunk due to quick fix online content and social media. I feel it too, and reading a book feels like yoga for the brain.”

How familiar that feels. My children have grown up around books stacked in kitchen and laundry cupboards, anywhere they can be squeezed, yet none is a reader like their parents were – I can’t even say “are”. For this strange affliction has infected us too. What happened? Life got in the way. The latest streamer had to be devoured and Twitter directed us down rabbit holes to articles we never knew we wanted to read. I mourn the remembrance of books past. Snatch at them in scattered, piecemeal fashion now; have a pile unread or unfinished on the bedside table.

I wonder if passionate book reading will become a niche activity, a rarefied segment of the industry of story consumption where zealous aficionados lurk. We’ll always have stories, of course; they explain our world to us, teach us how to live, make us feel less alone. But the way of disseminating narrative to the masses is veering and it feels like the potency of books is softening. Will this be catastrophic for our publishing industry? My gut feeling is yes. I hope I’m wrong.