Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.
Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
The Swiss family Robinson is an example of this. Times of interesting adventure and then long passages about poetry analysis.
Ironically, reading it feels like you are reading the works of an author with a low attention span.
There's a reason so many of the classics have abridged versions.
I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.
People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.
It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
This. Both movies and series are now FAR less popular (and profitable) than video games, and video games are far less popular than social media. Even the minority that still enjoys legacy media enjoys it WHILE consuming other media.
Movie theaters are in as much trouble as libraries, and blaming either of them for their decline in popularity without mentioning the root causes would be myopic.
The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought that lasts longer than the length of a TikTok video or tweet are dying.
People aren't watching TikToks while video gaming. The rise of video games, and the success of narrative ones, should tell us that people engage with the content and focus. For hours at a time.
But they need to care about it, expect way more quality and are way less tolerant of mediocrity. That's sure not great for Hollywood producers, cry me a river.
Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places, IMHO they'll happily outlive movie theaters by a few centuries.
I'm aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I can say from personal experience that most of the people I know pick up their phones whenever an unskippable cut scene appears on screen. Many, many people no longer have the patience for narrative in any form and as a consequence literacy rates have been declining for years.
> Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places
They have no choice. People can't read anymore. Fifty four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
My personal experience as a gamer and running a gaming community for many years does not line up with this at all.
I think that's the rub. Your experience is with people who care.
For example, I'm a cinephile. My personal experience is that people have home theaters with 100"+ screens, Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, and they would never use a cell phone during a film. That's not most peoples reality though.
Narrative video games are a tiny and obscure niche.
Reader's Digest was always there on the shelf at the store and was very commercially successful. Most people who consumed more advanced content ignored it.
We've had more publicly available educational content than ever with 40+ minutes videos finding their public. Podcasts have brought the quality of audio content to a new level, people pay to get additional content.
People are paying for publications like TheVerge, Medium and newsletter also became a viable business model. And they're not multitasking when watching YouTube or reading on their phone.
That's where I'd put the spotlight. And the key to all of it is, content length is often not dictated by ads (Sponsors pay by the unit, paid member don't get the ads) but by how long it needs to be.
If on the other hand we want to keep it bleak, I'd remind you that the before-the-web TV was mostly atrocious and aimed at people keeping it on while they do the dishes. The bulk of books sold where "Men come from Mars" airport books and movies were so formulaic I had a friends not pausing them when going to the bathroom without missing much.
Basically we accepted filler as a fact of life, and we're now asking the you generation while they're not bitting the bullet. And honestly, I can still read research papers but I completely lost tolerance for 400 pages book that could have been a blog post.
The same is true of books. If you think one book is bad, it's probably the book. If you think all/most books are slow you should work on your attention span.
I mostly read non-fiction, so the landscape is probably grimmer, but actual good books aren't that many, and I feel that has been a common wisdom for centuries. Except we're trying push that fact under the carpet as already fewer people are buying books.
Have you considered trying to optimize the way you discover your next read? It almost sounds like you're getting your recommendations from social media, and that it isn't really working out well for you.
The book industry isn't in a good shape otherwise[0], revenue has recovered while unit sales is declining.
I actually don't get recommendations per se, I mostly read books from authors I already like (fiction), or books on subject I think want to read and will scrape the reviews to see what to settle on, or straight go through each book if it's at my local library (non fiction).
A surprising number of them are available in the Kindle Unlimited bundle or at the library, so I read a lot without per unit money involved, and without the sunk cost calculation.
> your next read
I think that might be the core of it. I don't see books as something that needs to be read continually. I already use my eyes way too much, so it's not a hobby and I expect value that can't be gained from other means.
[0] https://nielseniq.com/global/en/news-center/2025/internation...
You are right, of course. My phrasing was off. I meant to say that we produce more books than ever.
Although that is also a bit of a misleading statement. It is factually true that we produce more books per annum than ever before, but the average book now sells far less than 1,000 copies in it's lifetime (one source I found said around 500) and the growth in quantity has not produced a corresponding growth in quality.
> I don't see books as something that needs to be read continually.
Fair enough. There are only so many hours in a lifetime, and we all have to choose how we spend the ones allotted to us. Although, personally I feel that the world would be better off if people spent more of them reading fiction, and fewer on social media.
Try going back in time and explaining to Neil Postman that people today find watching TV to be a chore that needs abbreviation or summarization.
I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4 tweet thread I posted.
Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
Fixed that to mean what you say.
Luckily, people still have the attention for good books. Which is why libraries still stock good books, classic or otherwise. They also stock books that people want to read. Which might seem odd until you realize that libraries are there for the community to use.
However, you are free to setup a library that stores books that no one reads.
At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old books that are moronic and if the population of the world back then had been the same as now there would be tons more.