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 people 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.
