Is The Written Word Dying? It’s Evolving

For thousands of years, the written word was our primary methods of preserving knowledge. We started with images scratched onto cave walls. Eventually we used clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, paper, books, and now digital screens. The tools have changed dramatically, but the basic idea hasn’t. We find something worth remembering, write it down, and pass it along to someone else.

In just a few short years, the internet, smartphones, and tablets have spread across much of the planet. Even an inexpensive smartphone today has capabilities that would have seemed unbelievable when home computers started becoming common in the 1980s and 1990s. We carry music collections, photographs, books, maps, cameras, calculators, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and access to an enormous amount of human knowledge in our pockets. At the same time, we are bombarded with video, social media, podcasts, notifications, emails, streaming services and, of course, AI. Many devices can translate languages almost instantly, making it possible for two people who don’t speak the same language to communicate with the touch of a button. Pretty cool or pretty overwhelming?

The way we consume information is changing worldwide. It’s a pretty big deal when you think about it. The written word helped build civilization. Ancient libraries were filled with scrolls, religious texts, historical records, laws, scientific observations, literature, business records, and the accumulated knowledge of generations. Writing allowed people to preserve an idea long after the person who originally had that idea was gone.

One famous ancient library was the Library of Celsus in Ephesus, located in what is now modern-day Turkey. Built during the Roman period in the second century AD, it reportedly held thousands of scrolls. The impressive facade still stands today. It is a reminder that people have been collecting, organizing, and protecting written knowledge for a very long time. Libraries have survived wars, fires, political changes, new inventions, and enormous changes in the way information is stored. Despite all the technological changes since those ancient libraries were built, libraries are still with us.

Here is the interesting part. The written word isn’t disappearing. It’s adapting. Every time a major new technology came along, somebody seemed ready to announce the death of reading. Radio was going to replace books. Television was going to replace books. Computers were going to replace books. Then the internet arrived. After that came eBooks, smartphones, streaming video, social media, and audiobooks. Yet here we are, thousands of years after the first written records, and people are still reading.

The Digital Revolution

The format may change, but our need for stories and information remains the same. A novel can now live on a bookshelf, a Kindle, a tablet, a smartphone, or in the cloud. That same novel can also become an audiobook and be listened to while somebody drives to work. The words are still there. The delivery system changed.

Will bookstores eventually turn into Blockbuster Video stores? I’d bet there are plenty of young adults today who don’t even know what a Blockbuster Video store was. They mostly exist in old photographs and movies now. At one time, though, driving to the video store on a Friday night and picking out a movie was completely normal. Technology changed and an entire business model practically disappeared. Could the same thing happen to bookstores?

I read a lot, mostly for pleasure. Usually at least one book a week. I don’t even count the technical manuals, software instructions, articles, and other material I read in between. That’s just part of my normal week. Back in the 1980s, if I wanted something new to read, I might drive to Barnes & Noble and buy a mystery, science-fiction novel, or fantasy book. Sometimes more than one. There was something enjoyable about walking through a bookstore without knowing exactly what I was going to buy.

I recently did a little research on Barnes & Noble because I wondered how traditional bookstores were holding up. They’re still here. I’m glad. There is something reassuring about knowing that physical bookstores haven’t simply disappeared because Amazon, eBooks, and digital technology arrived. If bookstores can adapt, I think libraries can too.

What concerns me isn’t really whether books will survive. I think they will. What concerns me more is our attention span. We live in a world of notifications, short videos, endless scrolling, headlines, advertising, texts, emails, and information overload. Sometimes it feels as if everyone is competing for the next ten seconds of our attention. Before you have finished thinking about one thing, something else is flashing, buzzing, ringing, or asking you to click it.

Reading requires something different. Reading asks us to slow down, concentrate, and spend some time with an idea. A good book doesn’t always explain everything in thirty seconds. Sometimes you have to stay with the story for hundreds of pages before you understand why something happened. Maybe that’s one reason books still matter. They give us something that social media can’t.

A good book allows us to escape for a while, learn something new, or see the world through somebody else’s eyes. Whether it’s a mystery novel, fantasy adventure, history book, biography, or science-fiction story, books let us experience people and places we might never encounter in our own lives. As a mystery writer, I may be a little biased, but I still believe there is something special about getting lost in a good story. If you’d like to read mine, you can download a free copy of In Plain Sight here.

Think about just a few things the digital revolution has brought into everyday life:

• The Internet
• Smartphones
• PCs, or personal computers
• Tablets
• eBooks
• Video streaming
• Email
• Search engines
• Digital libraries
• Audiobooks
• Artificial intelligence

When I was in high school and needed to write a paper about something I didn’t know anything about, which seemed to be every paper I was assigned, I went to the World Book Encyclopedia. For the very young, an encyclopedia wasn’t a website. It was a series of large, heavy hardcover books arranged alphabetically. Families bought entire sets of them, and they weren’t cheap. People actually made a living selling encyclopedias. We were fortunate enough to have a set at our house, but many of the kids I went to school with didn’t. Friends would sometimes come over to our house to do research because we had those books.

Think about that compared with today. A teenager can pull a smartphone out of a pocket and search for information in seconds. The amount of information available from that little device would have been almost impossible for us to imagine when I was growing up. The encyclopedia salesman is mostly gone because technology replaced the product he was selling. The need for information didn’t disappear. We simply developed a much faster way to get it.

Communication changed just as dramatically. When I wanted to ask a girl out in high school, I had two basic choices. Ask her in person or call her on the telephone. I’m talking about the kind of telephone attached to the wall by a cord. If you have enough gray hair, you might even remember rotary phones.

We had those when I was little, and ours came with something even better: a party line. Several households could share the same telephone line. Sometimes you picked up the phone and discovered that your neighbors were already talking. You had to wait until they finished before you could make your call. One of the families on our party line spoke Italian. Listening to their conversations helped keep me fluent until about the fourth grade. Try explaining a party line to somebody who grew up with a smartphone. The world has grown up some since the 1960s.

Today we can send a text across the country in seconds, make a video call to somebody on another continent, translate languages automatically, and share photographs with hundreds of people almost instantly. What once required letters, stamps, telephone operators, and days or weeks of waiting can now happen before you’ve finished drinking your coffee.

How Our Reading Habits Are Changing

Printed books versus eBooks is one of those debates that probably isn’t going away anytime soon. Barnes & Noble continues selling physical books despite competition from Amazon and digital publishing. Amazon, meanwhile, has become a major marketplace for printed books, eBooks, and audiobooks. What’s interesting is that these different formats continue to exist together.

Some readers still prefer the feel of a printed book in their hands. They like turning the pages, seeing books lined up on shelves, and maybe even that smell you get when you walk into a bookstore or library. Other readers prefer convenience. An e-reader, tablet, or smartphone can hold an enormous number of books without taking up another inch of shelf space.

Audiobooks created another option. Someone who doesn’t have time to sit down and read for an hour might listen to a novel while driving, exercising, walking the dog, or doing chores around the house. The format is changing, but people are still consuming stories and information. Reading on a phone, tablet, or e-reader is often convenience over tradition. One device can hold hundreds or thousands of books and still fit in your hand.

The more interesting question may not be whether we’re reading less. It may be whether we’re reading as deeply. There is a difference between consuming information and understanding it. Reading a social media post isn’t the same experience as reading a novel. Skimming a headline isn’t the same thing as studying a subject. Watching a thirty-second video about an important event isn’t the same thing as reading several detailed accounts and deciding for yourself what happened.

The internet gives us access to more information than at any other time in history. That doesn’t necessarily mean we understand more. We still have to decide what deserves our attention. That’s one of the strange contradictions of the digital age. Finding information has become incredibly easy, while deciding which information is worth believing has become more difficult.

What about libraries? Will they still be here in twenty years? Fifty years? I’m going with yes. Libraries have always adapted to technology. They went from scrolls to handwritten books, from handwritten books to printed books, from handwritten catalogs to card catalogs, and eventually from card catalogs to computers.

Today’s libraries can offer much more than shelves of printed books. Many provide eBooks, audiobooks, online databases, research tools, computers, internet access, educational programs, meeting spaces, and assistance for people who may not have access to those resources at home. The library didn’t disappear when the card catalog disappeared. It changed. That is really the theme of this entire story. Technology rarely destroys our need for something. More often, it changes how we satisfy that need. As long as people want to learn, discover, research, and explore new ideas, I think libraries will continue finding ways to serve their communities.

AI And The Future Of Learning

Now we have another enormous technological change happening: artificial intelligence. AI can locate, organize, summarize, and explain information remarkably quickly. I work with OpenAI ChatGPT, which I named Charlie, and he’s helping me check some of the facts on this page right now. AI has become a research assistant for me. Forget games like Trivial Pursuit. With AI sitting next to you, you’d probably win every time.

There is a catch. Believe it or not, AI isn’t always right. That is something everyone using these systems needs to understand. AI can provide an answer that sounds completely confident and still get something wrong. Names, dates, statistics, historical details, and even sources should sometimes be checked independently. You should still double-check important research.

AI gives us access to information faster than ever before, but there is a difference between getting a quick answer and tracking information back to an original source. The speed is impressive. Accuracy still matters. That doesn’t make AI useless. Far from it. A calculator didn’t make mathematics useless. Search engines didn’t eliminate research. Spell-check didn’t eliminate writing. These tools changed how we performed certain parts of the work. AI may do the same thing on a much larger scale.

A student can ask AI to explain a difficult concept in simpler language. A writer can use it to research a historical period. A programmer can ask for help understanding a piece of code. Someone learning another language can practice a conversation without worrying about embarrassing themselves. Used correctly, that’s powerful. Used carelessly, it can also make us lazy.

If every question is answered instantly, do we stop learning how to find answers ourselves? If software summarizes every book, do people stop reading the books? If AI writes every school paper, what exactly did the student learn? Those questions are going to become increasingly important. The technology isn’t going away. The challenge will be learning how to use it without allowing it to replace the thinking we’re supposed to be doing ourselves.

Why Books Still Matter

There are still some things that long-form reading does particularly well:

• Books encourage deeper concentration.
• Fiction develops imagination and empathy.
• Long-form reading can improve understanding of complicated subjects.
• Books allow readers to explore complex ideas in depth.
• Stories let us experience the world through another person’s perspective.
• Reading requires active participation from the imagination.
• Some experiences simply cannot be reduced to a thirty-second video clip.

When you read a novel, the author gives you words, but your mind does part of the work. If I describe a dark forest, you create that forest in your imagination. If I describe a character walking into an abandoned house, you decide what that hallway looks like. You hear the floorboards creak in your own way. A movie shows you somebody else’s version. A book lets you build part of the world yourself. That may be one reason books have survived so many supposedly revolutionary technologies.

I have lived through a lot of technological changes in my lifetime. I grew up with rotary phones, party lines, encyclopedias, and libraries filled with card catalogs. If I wanted information, I had to go find it. Today I can pull a smartphone out of my pocket, ask a question, and have an answer in seconds. I can read a newspaper published on the other side of the world, download a novel instantly, listen to an audiobook while driving, watch a lecture from a university I’ve never visited, or use AI to help research a subject. That kind of technology would have seemed like science fiction when I was a kid.

Imagine taking a modern smartphone back to 1965 and handing it to someone. Forget explaining TikTok. Try explaining that this little piece of glass can show them a live picture of someone thousands of miles away, translate another language, tell them exactly where they are anywhere on the planet, contain thousands of books, play almost any song they can name, take photographs and video, provide driving directions, and answer questions. Then tell them we mostly use it to argue with strangers and watch cat videos.

Technology changes quickly. People, maybe not quite as quickly. For all those changes, some things remain remarkably similar. People still want to learn. We still tell stories. We still search for answers, share ideas, entertain each other, and pass knowledge to the next generation. The tools have changed. The human need for information, entertainment, imagination, and understanding hasn’t.

Will books look different in the future? Probably. Will more people read on screens instead of paper? Maybe. Will AI become an even larger part of education, research, publishing, and everyday life? I think that’s almost guaranteed. But I don’t believe the written word is going anywhere.

Writing has already survived enormous technological changes. We moved from carving symbols into stone and pressing marks into clay to writing on papyrus and parchment. Eventually we developed paper, movable type, printing presses, typewriters, computers, word processors, eBooks, smartphones, and artificial intelligence. At every stage, the technology changed. The words remained.

The written word isn’t dying. It’s evolving, just as it always has. From cave walls and clay tablets to printed books and digital screens, every generation has found new ways to preserve and share knowledge. Maybe someday we’ll read books through glasses that project words directly in front of us. Maybe AI will translate every book instantly into every language. Maybe the devices we’re using today will look as ancient to our grandchildren as a rotary telephone looks to a teenager now. I have no idea. That’s part of what makes technology interesting.

What matters isn’t whether the words arrive on paper, a screen, through headphones, or through some technology that hasn’t been invented yet. What matters is that we continue to read, learn, think, question, imagine, and pass what we’ve learned to the people who come after us. As long as we keep doing that, the written word isn’t going anywhere.