Walking up Madison Avenue during January’s polar vortex, I turned the corner onto 39th Street and hit a line of puffy coats, tote bags and young people with wired headphones. I had no idea what they were waiting for until I reached Fifth Avenue and saw that the line ended at the New York Public Library’s front door.
We had opened the library for a large-scale reading party for the first time. A data analyst had come from Queens to read poetry. A teacher had made the trip from the Bronx. More than a thousand people filed in. There weren’t enough chairs, and we ended up turning hundreds of people away. I ended up on the floor with a romance novel involving a barista pining over a beefy hockey player.
This was not an anomaly. More New Yorkers are borrowing books from the New York Public Library today than 15 years ago; borrowing is up 27 percent since 2010. And yet America is facing a book-reading crisis.
A 2025 study in iScience, a research journal focused on the sciences, found that pleasure reading fell 40 percent from 2003 to 2023, and a 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress report showed that the share of 13-year-olds reading for fun almost every day has dropped to 14 percent, the lowest level since the federal government began asking the question in 1984. The diagnoses keep coming. Screens. Shrinking attention spans. A culture losing its appetite for books. And nearly every prescription is addressed to individuals: Read more, put your phone down, try harder.
I’m the chief librarian at the New York Public Library. In nearly 30 years of leading libraries across four U.S. cities, I’ve seen this decline up close. To be sure, one part of the solution is finding more effective ways to teach children to read in the first place. But teaching someone to read and building a world where they can do so are different problems. Throwing our phones in the lake can’t bring about that world, but designing the conditions for reading will.
In the 19th century, America began to build a national network of free public libraries in nearly every community. And then almost overnight, Google could answer any question, and Amazon could deliver any book. Who needed a building full of them?
Instead of disappearing, libraries remained indispensable, just not for reading and books. In community after community, local libraries filled society’s gaps. Computer classes, voter registration, literacy programs, social services, job training. It was important work that came with little new money. The first thing to get squeezed was the books.
Then came a harder truth. Libraries themselves were throwing up barriers to reading. In 2019 the Chicago Public Library found that its overdue fine policy had created a two-tiered system. In the city’s lower-income South District, one-third of cardholders were barred from borrowing because they owed $10 or more in fines and fees. On the more affluent North District, that share dropped to roughly one-sixth. A few dollars could lock an 8-year-old out of the library.
That October, Chicago became the largest city in America to eliminate fines for overdue materials. Three weeks later, returns of overdue books were up 240 percent. Within a year, 111,000 patrons renewed or replaced their library cards. From 2019 to 2021, major library systems across the country — including those of Dallas, Denver, San Francisco and New York City went late-fee-free.
When the Covid pandemic closed library doors, we told ourselves that reading would simply move online. For wealthier communities with home broadband, it did. For communities where people have slower internet service or none at all, it didn’t. Only when libraries reopened, when people could walk in and pull a spine off a shelf, did the numbers start recovering.
When libraries reinvested in books, the gains were larger. The Harris County Public Library in Texas invested early in digital lending when many systems had not. Checkouts grew from one million to seven million in seven years. At the New York Public Library, as part of a special, limited-time program this past January, we turned on unlimited digital access for Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels, including the best seller “Heated Rivalry.” Normally, readers would have had to wait months for such a popular title to be available for their e-readers. Instead, 40,000 people downloaded the books in three weeks, and thousands of new patrons registered for library cards.
Other countries have gone further. Last year Denmark’s government announced a plan to eliminate the highest book tax in the world, citing its reading crisis as the reason; Argentina exempts books from tax, alongside bread, milk and medicine; Italy introduced a policy in 2016 that gave every 18-year-old a 500-euro cultural voucher, and 70 percent of it was spent on books; France, Germany and Spain followed with vouchers of their own.
America did not build its library system by accident. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company because he believed a free country required citizens who could think, reason and govern themselves. A century and a half later, Andrew Carnegie (and later his foundation) funded 1,681 libraries across the country, this time as free spaces built on the condition that towns would maintain them. By 2010, there were over 17,000 public library branches and bookmobiles. A democracy needs its people to read, and it is society’s job to make that possible — the same reason we have public schools, water systems and the electric grid.
The reading crisis is real. But we don’t need new inventions to build a reading city. Exempt books from sales taxes the way we exempt prescription medicine. Invest in library collections and reduce wait lists for books. Open nonprofit and hybrid bookstores when the market alone cannot sustain them. Build on the models that already work: reading in laundromats, libraries in transit systems, books in barbershops, classrooms, homes and pediatric offices.
None of this is theoretical. Every time someone designs the conditions for reading, people read. A data analyst from Queens. A teacher from the Bronx. The thousand New Yorkers who showed up on a freezing January night for a library reading party.
Brian Bannon is the chief librarian and the director of branch libraries and education of the New York Public Library.
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