Why can’t we read anymore?

I've read over 500 fiction books and 2000+ non-fiction. I've read many of the big thick classics like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Infinite Jest. I've kept a spreadsheet of all the books I've read somewhat like Art Garfunkel[1] (of Simon & Garfunkel music duo).

I've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc.

With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.

I also enjoy getting lost in Wikipedia articles and jumping around hyperlinks without fully finishing the wiki article I was reading. (Wiki articles are not ever "finished" anyway so there's no guilt trip in leaving the page to head down another rabbit hole.)

15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? I think so. I don't hold my traditional reading method for C++ to be superior; it's simply what I did before the internet was available in 1995. I certainly did not learn Golang by reading a book cover-to-cover.

Books certainly have benefits but I think they are overstated in relation to non-book forms of consuming words.

[1]http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...

This is a difficult problem a lot of us face. I personally have a habit of glancing through hundreds of articles that pop in my RSS reader everyday. Often after reading a handful of those articles, some of them providing certain bits and pieces of knowledge, I feel like it would have been better to focus on a single topic and learn more about it. That's where I miss books. Although I have many of them sitting in the shelf right next to me, it has become more difficult for me in the recent years to pick one up and start reading. I think it's time for a change. Thanks OP for sharing this.

Does that include this article that said something very similar?

For some time I thought I definitely had a shorter attention span due to the internet - I'd be reading something, and compulsively have to go check my email, facebook, forums I visit, hacker news, my frequented subreddits. Read a bit more. Check everything. Repeat.

But I didn't find it all that hard to just close my laptop and put my phone facedown more than an arm's length away. I thought it would be a titanic struggle - but as soon as I made it slightly inconvenient to distract myself, I found myself once again able to read through hundreds of pages of books.

It's anecdotal, of course. But for me, being able to "read" again was as simple of giving myself the slightest barrier to getting distracted.

One of the great tests for me personally is can I even remember the last 10 headlines or articles I read? The dopamine hit is in the discovery, not necessarily the comprehension.