Are Books Dead?
- sulla80
- Jul 19
- 9 min read
Before I dive in, a confession: I like books. Old, slightly yellowed books especially. This note started with a single question: Are books dead? By the end, you won't get a simple "yes" or "no", however, you will get a tour through ancient Latin words and a few data points.
A Roman book was a roll
A book at Rome was a volumen, a roll. The word gives us “volume,” and it means a thing that is rolled.
The material was papyrus, made from the pith of Cyperus papyrus, a sedge grown in the Nile delta. Strips of pith were laid in two crossed layers, pressed, dried, and polished, then glued edge to edge into a continuous sheet. Pliny the Elder describes the process at length, including the grades of quality and their names (Natural History 13.68-89).
The roll was written in narrow columns, called paginae, running along its length. A reader held it in both hands, unrolling with the right and rolling up with the left, so that the read portion accumulated in one hand while the unread waited in the other.
This shape set a limit. A roll of workable length held roughly what we would call one book of a long work. That is why the Aeneid has twelve books and Livy’s history had a hundred and forty-two: the literary unit began as a physical one.
A finished roll had a wooden rod at its core, the umbilicus, and a tag hanging from the edge with the title, the sittybos, so a reader could identify it without unrolling. Rolls were stored upright in a cylindrical box, a capsa, or laid in pigeonholes.
Catullus opens his collection by handing over the object itself, freshly made:
“To whom do I give my charming new little book, just now polished with dry pumice?” Catullus 1The pumice is literal. The cut ends of a roll were smoothed with a pumice stone. Catullus is describing a physical product on the day it left the workshop.
The Trade
Rome had a book trade. Copies were made by hand, usually by trained enslaved scribes called librarii, and sold from shops. Horace pictures his own book as a young slave impatient to be displayed for sale in the booksellers’ quarter (Epistles 1.20).
Martial names his booksellers and quotes his prices. He sends a reader to the shop of Atrectus in the Argiletum, and tells him what a copy costs:
“You can have me smoothed with pumice and adorned with purple for five denarii.” Martial, Epigrams 1.117
Five denarii was a meaningful sum, roughly five days of a legionary’s pay before deductions, though the comparison is rough. Books were available to people of means and to their households, and were copied privately besides. Cicero’s friend Atticus ran a copying operation that functioned as something between a publisher and a private library service.
How many people could use them is disputed. William Harris argued in Ancient Literacy (1989) for rates in the Roman West somewhere in the range of ten to fifteen percent, higher in cities and among men, and the figure remains contested.
Libraries and Reading Aloud
Public libraries came late and arrived with politics. Asinius Pollio founded the first at Rome around 39 BCE, funded from the spoils of his Illyrian campaign. Augustus followed with libraries on the Palatine and in the Porticus Octaviae, and Trajan with the Bibliotheca Ulpia beside his forum.
The provinces built them too. The Library of Celsus at Ephesus, finished about 117 CE, survives as a facade of paired columns and niches, and it doubled as the tomb of the man it commemorates. Its reading room held wall niches for cupboards of rolls, with a gap behind the walls to protect them from damp.
Reading was often aloud, and often social. Pliny the Younger’s letters describe the recitatio, the author’s reading of new work to an invited audience, as a routine and sometimes tiresome feature of literary life (Letters 1.13).
Two wall paintings from Pompeii, both now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, show the tools. One is the so-called Sappho, a young woman holding a stylus to her lips with a set of hinged wax tablets in her hand. The other is the double portrait usually called Terentius Neo and his wife: he holds a papyrus roll, she holds tablets and a stylus. Wax tablets were the everyday surface, used for drafts, accounts, letters, and school, and the roll was the finished form.
The Codex
The format we now call a book, folded leaves bound along one edge, is the codex. It appears in the first century CE and is dominant by the fourth.
Martial advertised the new thing. In a poem prefacing a pocket edition, he tells the reader that these parchment pages travel:
“You who want my little books to keep you company wherever you go, and look for them as companions on a long journey, buy these, which parchment confines within small pages.” Martial, Epigrams 1.2The codex won on four counts. It held far more text in one object. It allowed a reader to open directly to a passage rather than winding through. It took writing on both sides of the leaf, halving the material. And it survived handling better.
Christian communities adopted it early and almost exclusively, while pagan literary texts stayed on rolls for generations longer. The surviving papyri show the split clearly, and Colin Roberts and T. C. Skeat set out the evidence in The Birth of the Codex (1983). A single codex could hold the four gospels, which no roll could do.
Parchment, membrana, treated animal skin, gradually displaced papyrus in the West, helped by the collapse of Mediterranean trade routes that had supplied Egyptian papyrus.
A thousand years of copying, then print
Through the European Middle Ages books were copied by hand, in monastic scriptoria and later by commercial workshops serving the universities. Copying was slow, expensive, and error-prone, and every copy differed from its exemplar.
Movable type had been invented earlier in East Asia. Bi Sheng made ceramic type in eleventh-century China, and the Korean Jikji of 1377 is the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type.
Johannes Gutenberg’s press, working at Mainz around 1450, combined movable metal type with an oil-based ink and a screw press adapted from wine production. The cost per copy fell once the setup cost was spread across a print run.
Elizabeth Eisenstein argued in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) that print produced standardization, preservation, and the accumulation of reliable knowledge. Adrian Johns replied in The Nature of the Book (1998) that early print was chaotic, piratical, and unreliable, and that its authority had to be built by hard institutional work rather than following from the technology.
The book then absorbed one further transformation, the cheap paperback. Allen Lane launched Penguin in 1935 at sixpence a copy, the price of a packet of cigarettes, and put serious literature in railway stations.
The last fifty years
Project Gutenberg began digitizing public domain texts in 1971. Amazon released the Kindle in 2007, and the electronic book briefly looked like a successor rather than a supplement.
That did not happen. The ebook took a share of the market and then settled. In the United States in 2025 electronic editions accounted for something close to thirty percent of book sales, while print units held at roughly 762 million, slightly up on the year before.
Audio has been the growth story. The audiobook, which returns the text to the ear it came from, is now the fastest-growing segment, with global revenue rising at rates well above print or ebook.
Reader preference has stayed conservative. Pew Research surveys find print still the most-used format among American adults, with electronic and audio well behind, and about three quarters of adults reporting they read all or part of at least one book in the previous year.
(just when you were wondering - where's the coin?)
Are books dead?
Roughly three quarters of American adults read at least part of a book in a year, print unit sales are stable, and the global book market is around $143 billion and growing slowly. An industry that size is not dead.
Rome was an oral culture that used writing. Poetry was performed, history was recited, letters were read aloud by a slave to a listening household, and even solitary readers commonly voiced the text. The silent private reader absorbed in a page is a later development, and the period in which reading was the dominant way an ordinary person encountered an argument or a story is measured in a few centuries, not millennia.
Seen that way, the television shows, the podcast and the video essay look less like disruption and more like a return. A person listening to a two-hour interview while driving is doing something a Roman would have recognized more readily than silent reading. The technology is new; the channel is old. And the latest AI generated voices and conversations with material make learning and "reading" less serial.
What is genuinely new is the economics. A codex asks for a decision once, at purchase, and then leaves the reader alone. A feed makes a fresh bid for attention every few seconds and is optimized, continuously and at scale, to win that bid. The competition is not between reading and watching. It is between formats that ask for sustained attention and formats engineered to fragment it.
That competition shows up in the data: Gallup found Americans reading fewer books per year than in previous decades, and the decline is concentrated among the heaviest readers rather than spread evenly. The middle of the distribution has not changed much. The top has thinned.
It is also worth noting that new formats are not always rivals: BookTok, the reading community on TikTok, has driven substantial print sales of fiction, particularly among younger readers, which is a video platform selling paper.
There is also an argument that ancient writers would have found familiar. Seneca complained that libraries had become furniture, bought for display by men who could not read through the titles they owned, and he made a point that survives the change of medium:
“The abundance of books is a distraction.” Seneca, On Tranquillity of Mind 9Information overload is not a symptom of the internet. It is what happens whenever a culture produces more text than any person can read, and Rome crossed that line too.
Books as the default way a society thinks together have been demoted, and that demotion began with radio and television, long before the smartphone.
The roll gave way to the codex, the manuscript to print, the hardback to the paperback, and every one of those transitions was experienced by somebody as a loss. As someone who is still surrounded by paper books as I write this, and someone who turns to paper ever day for some subset of my daily information, I see the reality that they are like the vinyl records that I also once enjoyed (for music) - still useful but definitely not the only medium and maybe not the most influential anymore.
One data point leaves my pondering: a National Bureau of Economic Research study reported that following the widespread adoption of LLMs between 2022 and 2025, new book releases on Amazon nearly tripled, with AI-containing titles exceeding 60% of all new publications by 2025. At the least we will all have to get better at sifting through "Stuff worth reading" and "Stuff not worth reading".
This in just my opinion, as Yogi Berra (or Mark Twain, or Niels Bohr, or Sam Goldwyn, or Robert Storm Petersen) famously said: "Det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden" ("it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future"). Apparently this quote originated as a Danish proverb and has been attributed to almost everyone since then.
References
Ancient sources
Catullus. Poems 1. Translated by Leonard C. Smithers. London, 1894.
Horace. Epistles 1.20. Translated by C. Smart. Philadelphia: Joseph Whetham, 1836.
Martial. Epigrams 1.2, 1.117. Translated by Walter C. A. Ker. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1919-20.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History 13.68-89, on papyrus manufacture. Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley. London: Taylor and Francis, 1855.
Pliny the Younger. Letters 1.13, on recitations. Translated by William Melmoth, revised by F. C. T. Bosanquet.
Seneca. On Tranquillity of Mind 9. Translated by Aubrey Stewart. London: George Bell and Sons, 1900.
Recent scholarship
Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Harris, William V. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Roberts, Colin H., and T. C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1983.
Reimers, Imke, and Joel Waldfogel. "AI and the Quantity and Quality of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books?" NBER Working Paper No. 34777, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, January 2026 (revised May 2026).
Recent Data
Gallup. “Americans Reading Fewer Books Than in Past.” Gallup News.
Pew Research Center. “Americans Still Opt for Print Books over Digital or Audio Versions.” April 9, 2026.
Semafor. “Audiobook Growth Contrasts with Print.” December 30, 2025.
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