This is why everyone in publishing should go back to school and re-sit their maths and science, or failing that ask ChatGPT what causal means.
Part 3 of an occasional series examining the evidence behind The Atlantic’s clickbait claims that reading is dead.
Hachette Book Group and Hachette UK chief executive David Shelley never struck me as a bandwagon-jumper, so likely his Los Angeles Times op-ed “The Global Reading Crisis That Started With Smartphones” was written, or at least commissioned, before The Atlantic‘s obituary for reading made headlines across the publishing world.
Maybe the LA Times rushed it out to cash in on the clickbait bonanza The Atlantic‘s RIP Reading post had kicked off. Or maybe it was coincidence.
What it wasn’t, and here the Shelley post shares a place with The Atlantic‘s post, was in any way reasoned or rational. Which is fine coming from an Atlantic reporter with no meaningful connection with the book publishing industry.
But when it comes from the CEO of a Big Five player, who ought to know better, and who in the past has shown to have a meaningful grasp of reality, it becomes a problem.
Within 48 hours the LA Times post was running, largely verbatim, as syndicated Tribune Content Agency copy in local papers across the United States and beyond – the Bend Bulletin, the Times Leader, the Korea Times, the Yakima Herald, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and more.
And that’s the thing. This isn’t one executive’s opinion tucked away in a trade newsletter. It’s now the default, wire-distributed explanation for declining youth reading, delivered with the authority of one of the world’s largest publishers, and absorbed by readers in dozens of markets without a single editor along the way apparently pausing to check if the argument underneath it had a pulse. (But then, which editor would be brave enough to call-out a Big 5 CEO anyway?)
That argument – the Shelley argument blaming smartphones, not the question of an LA Times editor quietly looking the other way – deserves the same scrutiny this TNPS series has already applied to The Atlantic. Shelley’s argument shares the same shape, and the same flaw, and is part of the same problem, which is why it qualifies as part three of a series initially fully-focussed on the 8k-word Horowitch reading obituary.
What Shelley actually argued
The LA Times op-ed’s core data point is real and should be taken seriously: American children’s pleasure reading fell from 53% in 2012 to 39% in 2022, per National Endowment for the Arts figures, mirrored in National Centre for Education Statistics data and comparable studies elsewhere.
Memo to the Luddite Fringe: 2012-2022 pretty much one hundred percent rules out blaming AI, which only emerged in the public domain in November 2022.
Shelley notes, credibly, that the decline in reading for pleasure began around 2011 – and observes that this is roughly when smartphone adoption crossed 50% of American adults. From there, he draws a direct line: smartphones caused the decline.
That in itself is beyond amusing. LinkedIn is awash with assertions that AI is removing the need to think and reason, and that critical thinking will be lost, and here is the head of a Big 5 publisher showing that critical thinking has been MIA for a long while.
To his credit, Shelley doesn’t oversimplify entirely. He acknowledges that a smaller pool of committed readers is buying more books than ever, which, he explains, is currently masking the scale of the problem for the industry.
He notes the decline has hit lower-income, less-educated, rural, and – a genuinely (Sorry – AI word! Or is it? Just saying that because real robot wouldn’t think to double bluff!) under-discussed point – male readers hardest.
Those are real, checkable, well-sourced observations (observations, not scientific facts), and this piece isn’t going out of its way to dispute them. Although their significance is somewhat over-exaggerated (the sky is always falling in Publishing Land, and publishing doesn’t care who’s playing Chicken Licken).
What TNPS absolutely disputes is the remarkable leap Shelley makes from “these two trends share a decade” to “one caused the other.” That’s not evidence. It’s a correlation, and a correlation between two things that were both, unsurprisingly, happening to most of American life at the same time.
This is why everyone in publishing should go back to school and re-sit their maths and science, or failing that ask ChatGPT what causal means.
A publisher who should know better
Here’s what makes this more than a routine complaint about sloppy causal reasoning: Shelley has, on the record, a far more careful relationship with the question of trusting what’s actually in front of you than this op-ed suggests.
TNPS covered this back in June, when Shelley pushed back (Sorry! Another AI-ish phrase) publicly against AI-detection culture in publishing, arguing that scanning submissions for suspicion rather than judging them on their merits poisons the relationship between publishers and authors.
His authority for that position isn’t abstract. In 2011 – the same year his own op-ed now fingers as the start of the reading crisis – Shelley acquired a crime novel from an unknown debut author named Robert Galbraith, on the strength of the manuscript alone. He found out over lunch that Galbraith was J.K. Rowling. He built a career-defining editorial judgment on evidence, not assumption.
The man who knows, better than almost anyone in publishing, what it costs to jump to conclusions about origin rather than examining what’s actually there is the same man now building a global argument on a chart with two lines that happen to slope the same way.
Stay tuned to the LA Times and maybe next week David Shelley will explain how the collapse in reading was caused by JK Rowling pretending to be a man. (And take a second to savour the irony there!)
The same week, a different verdict
A reminder here that Shelley heads Hachette UK, and last time I looked, that was where the British Library was to be found. An august a publishing institution as any on the planet.
So Shelley’s Los Angeles originating op-ed didn’t just land at an inconvenient moment. It landed in the same fortnight that Britain’s own literary establishment was busy proving the opposite point to the one Shelley was headlining, in his own market, in the British Library, using the exact device he’s blaming. You couldn’t make it up…
Here’s what happened.
On Thursday 2 July, TikTok partnered with the UK’s National Year of Reading to host BookTok Late at the British Library – a full evening of panels and readings, chaired by “the internet’s resident librarian” Jack Edwards, with the British Library’s own printed heritage curator taking part alongside TikTok’s UK communications lead.
David Hayman, director of the National Literacy Trust – not exactly an organisation known for talking down the seriousness of the reading crisis – sat on a panel titled “reading at the heart of culture.” Jon Fawcett, the British Library’s head of events, called it a chance to “explore our collection in new ways as part of a global community of readers.”
This is not a fringe enthusiasm. It’s the national body charged with improving literacy in the UK, hosting a smartphone app inside the British Library, as part of a government-adjacent national reading campaign, in the same month David Shelley told readers across dozens of newspapers that smartphones are why children have stopped reading.
Let me note, the numbers behind that partnership warrant a moment’s scepticism before taking at face value. They come from research TikTok itself commissioned.
Public First, with additional analysis from EY, published a report crediting TikTok-driven activity with £10 billion in UK economic contribution for 2025, of which the book-specific claim (£175m in consumer book spending, one in four 18-to-24-year-olds on the platform buying a book after seeing it there) forms a small part. That’s a company-funded figure and deserves the caveat any PR-adjacent statistic does.
But it isn’t standing alone. Independent retail-sales tracking from Circana Bookscan has attributed tens of millions of print book sales in a single year to BookTok-related content, and NielsenIQ BookData’s analysis for the European market shows over fifty million BookTok-recommended books sold in 2025 alone.
Wherever the exact figure lands, the direction of the evidence is consistent and comes from more than one interested party: this particular smartphone platform is currently correlated with more people buying and reading physical books, not fewer. Oops!
Booksellers on the ground back this up in less abstract terms. Independent shop owners interviewed by The Bookseller described BookTok driving genuine footfall – a German customer who built an entire Bournemouth holiday around visiting a shop she’d found through the app; a wave of niche independent bookshops opening to cater to BookTok-literate audiences; special editions and signed copies pulling browsers away from their phones and into physical shops specifically because the app made them want the object, not just the content.
None of that is captured in an NEA pleasure-reading survey. And it certainly doesn’t fit neatly into “smartphones are why children have stopped reading”.
But it fits very comfortably into the argument this series has been making since Part 1: reading hasn’t declined so much as it’s changed shape, and the instruments built to measure a mid-century publishing model keep missing where it actually is.
What else was happening in 2011
If bare timing-correlation is sufficient evidence – arrival in the same window as the decline, nothing more required – as David Shelley argues, it’s worth noting what else lines up. Not as an alternative theory to be taken any more seriously than Shelley’s own, but as a demonstration of how little “it started around the same time” actually proves.
American education adopted Common Core in this exact window. Most states signed on in 2010, with classroom implementation and Common Core-aligned standardised testing landing overwhelmingly in 2011 and 2012 – precisely Shelley’s start date.
A shift toward test-driven literacy instruction is, if anything, more mechanistically plausible as a driver of declining pleasure reading specifically than a device in a teenager’s pocket – it’s the direct cause of exactly the kind of joyless, assessment-driven reading experience that teachers have been warning about for over a decade.
Repeat for UK, where synthetic phonics and making kindergarten kids read to the test became official policy, and sadly still is today.
Self-publishing was exploding in the same years. The UK Kindle store opened in 2010; self-published output scaled dramatically through this period on both sides of the Atlantic. Same timing. Opposite implication – more people reading and writing outside the channels publishers and the NEA survey instruments were built to count.
Post-2008 austerity was landing on school and library budgets in this same window. Librarian positions and library funding took some of their hardest hits in exactly these years – a far more mechanistically direct explanation for reduced access to books among lower-income and rural readers, the very groups Shelley’s own piece flags as hit hardest.
Sorry, David, but it gets worse.
Netflix went from novelty to cultural fixture in precisely this window. Its streaming-only plan launched in 2010; 2011 brought dedicated “Netflix” buttons on Smart TV and games-console remotes, removing the last friction between a viewer and a show; by February 2013, House of Cards had proven a streaming platform could produce prestige television and pull in millions of subscribers on the strength of it.
This one carries a particular irony. Publishing has spent the better part of the last decade blaming Netflix and “screen time” broadly for reading’s decline it’s one of the industry’s most reliable go-to scapegoats.
Shelley’s own op-ed doesn’t mention it. In fact, Shelley is one of the few publishing notables who wasn’t screaming Netflix Is Killing Reading last decade. Credit where due.
When the finger needs pointing, apparently, a phone in a teenager’s pocket is a safer target than a fellow entertainment giant with which Hachette itself does licensing business.
None of these deserves to replace Shelley’s smartphone theory as the “real” answer.
And that’s precisely the point.
Four different, entirely real developments all share the same few years. Picking one and calling it causal, because you work in an industry with an obvious institutional incentive to blame a rival technology rather than your own industry’s shift toward assessment culture, isn’t analysis. It’s convenient.
The same mistake, a third time
Part 1 of this series showed how The Atlantic mistook a Cold War propaganda campaign for evidence of ordinary reading habits.
Part 2 showed how it mistook office-multitasking research for evidence about book-length attention.
This is the same error again, now coming from inside the industry that should have the least incentive to get it wrong: a real decline, a real correlation, and a leap to causation that skips past every other plausible explanation – including the one Shelley’s own industry might have some responsibility for.
Shelley is right that the reading decline among children is real and troubling. He’s right that it deserves urgent attention. He is simply wrong about why, in exactly the way his own professional history should have taught him to be more careful about.
The next instalment in this series turns to a related conflation – not what’s causing reading to change, but what’s allowed to count as reading in the first place.
This is Part 3 of an occasional TNPS series examining the evidence behind claims that reading is in terminal decline.
Part 4 asks whether listening to an audiobook counts as reading. That matters for many reasons, but here primarily because if the answer is yes, and we allow that audiobook consumption is still growing, then the whole reading is dead narrative itself needs to be buried.
Which would be unfortunate for this series, as there’s so much more to extract from The Atlantic’s nonsense before I’m ready to place the tombstone there, so expect a robust rebuttal to the listening is reading argument in Part 4 amid further annihilation of the Atlantic’s reading obituary.
Reading never died. Long live reading.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analsyis Newsletter.
