Bring on the bad news?

On Thursday I refused to click on a Substack story claiming to tell me the real reason why nobody’s reading any more. On Friday, I read Shelf Awareness which bears the news “Total net book sales in April in the U.S. rose 4.4%, to $887.7 million, compared to April 2025, representing sales of 1,416 publishers and distributed clients as reported to the Association of American Publishers. For the first four months of the year, net book sales rose 1.7%, to $3.774 billion.” On Saturday, the otherwise sensible Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland of the podcast “The Rest is History” were being interviewed on the radio, and one of them tells us, as a fact, that book sales are declining. This whole “nobody’s reading” meme is a classic example of an answer in search of a problem. The social analyst looks around and sees that social media are occupying a lot of a lot of people’s time — this obviously has to mean they have less time to spend on other activities. So what other things might that be?…