A Book-shaped Hole

When people realize I'm a librarian, they often want to share their own relationship to reading. Sometimes they tell me they don't read so much nowadays, but they read ebooks, or listen to audiobooks, almost like a confession. I've also had parents ask me for advice on how to get their reluctant reader kids to put the phone down. "It's a good thing that they listen to books, right?" I have to tell them: reading and listening actually converge on meaning in the brain, that much research is fairly clear on. Where they diverge is in how much of the work you have to do yourself. A narrator's voice can hand you the sarcasm, the emphasis, the joke, already performed.

Silent reading gives you none of that. You have to build the tone yourself, from nothing but the words on the page, which is exactly the muscle that needs the exercise. Structured thought. Understanding instructions. Vocabulary. Capacity to focus. Empathy, too, though not in some vague, feel-good sense, but something closer to symbolization: the ability to build a film in your head, to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to catch the unsaid, the ironic, the sarcastic, all the things a story doesn't spell out for you, and that you have to spell out for yourself. You need to practice to develop stamina. Much like a push-up, there's no way to get good at reading except to actually do it. To manage at university, you need to be better than good. You need to become an excellent reader, or develop skillful strategies to cope around the deficiency if you never did.

The Brain on Paper, The Brain on Screen.

None of this is just a feeling. A 2024 meta-analysis of 49 studies found that paper readers consistently score higher on comprehension tests than screen readers, a pattern researchers now call the "screen inferiority effect." Norwegian reading researcher Anne Mangen found something specific and almost mechanical: readers using a Kindle were significantly worse at recalling a story's chronological order than print readers, and her explanation points to sensorimotor cues, the physical thickness of pages read versus remaining, the ability to flip back, that a screen simply doesn't offer. Eye-tracking studies back this up behaviorally: readers on paper re-read important passages more; readers on screens skim more. A recent MRI study found measurably different brain activity between the two.

The children's version of this finding is the one that stays with me. Research found that kids who grow up with access to physical books complete, on average, three additional years of education than those who don't, and researchers have found no equivalent effect for e-books. Separately, an MRI study found that children who read more physical books show stronger brain connections in language and cognitive-control regions, while children with more screen time show fewer of them.

Sweden's response to its own reading decline has been to treat it as one connected problem: pull back on the screens, and put something concrete in their place.

New York's Answer, or Answers.

New York's response has been harder to describe as one thing, because it isn't one thing.

Statewide, a bell-to-bell personal phone ban took effect last year, aimed at distraction, not curriculum, even as the city simultaneously distributed 350,000 new school-issued Chromebooks to modernize instruction.

Then, this August, Mayor Mamdani cancelled the $200 million T-Mobile internet contract his predecessor had signed to keep those same Chromebooks connected at home, a move reported alongside "growing backlash against the reliance on technology in city classrooms," though the Education Department's own stated reason was cost: the deal "duplicated existing resources at an unnecessary cost." One Brooklyn principal said his school had already shifted away from classroom Chromebooks over concerns about overreliance on technology, and that dozens of the devices sit unused in storage. One Manhattan principal, serving a poorer population, said one in five of his students depend on exactly that connectivity to have internet at home at all.

And separately, since July, an 8-week-and-counting freeze on all new educational software purchases, meant to buy time for a rewritten AI policy after an earlier draft drew fierce parental backlash, has left principals unable to renew even ordinary, non-AI tools like gradebooks and family communication apps, with the school year starting and no finalized guidance in sight.

The Cost of Finding Out

Here's the uncomfortable part: we won't know for years whether any of this actually worked. PISA runs once every three years, and Sweden's library law is barely a year old. By the time the data can tell us anything, will anyone still be asking?

I don't know enough about education policy to tell you which country has it right. What I can tell you is this: few lasting changes come for free.

Sweden's answer isn't one grant, it's three, working together: money for textbooks, money specifically for fiction and nonfiction books that aren't textbooks, and money to staff a library to hold them. That's not a moonshot. It's not really even that expensive. What it is, is coherent: three separate grants aimed at the same gap, arriving at the same time, on purpose.

Because NYC's answer, so far, hasn't cost anything, since nothing has been added back. A phone ban here. A Chromebook contract cancelled there, its savings quietly doing the work its pedagogy talk gets credit for. A software freeze with no software to replace it. Three retreats, no reinvestment, nothing standing in the gap where the screens used to be.

A country and a city aren't quite the same thing to govern, and Sweden's 10.6 million people aren't NYC's 8.3. But they're close enough in size that the comparison still means something. Neither has proof yet that it's right. But real change, the kind that outlasts a news cycle, usually asks something of the people making it, and usually knows what it's trying to build, not just what it's tearing down. So far, only one of these has both.

The Hole Filler

None of this, the brain science, the funding tables, the cancelled contracts, answers the question a parent actually asked me: is it a good thing that they listen to books? And the honest answer is still yes, and also, that was never really the question to focus on.

The real question is what happens to the space where the screen used to be. Anxiety about technology isn't a strategy. It's just anxiety, and it's cheap, in every sense of the word: it costs nothing to be afraid of screens, and it produces nothing on its own either. A phone ban produces a quieter classroom. It doesn't produce a reader. A cancelled Chromebook contract produces a line item in a budget. It doesn't produce a library. Retreat, on its own, just leaves a hole exactly the shape of whatever you took away.

Sweden's bet, right or wrong, at least tries to answer that question. Here's what goes in the hole: a book, a place to keep it, someone paid to help a kid find it. NYC's approach, so far, hasn't answered it at all. It's mostly just described the hole, in increasing detail, across three different offices, over the course of a single year.

If we actually mean it when we say we're worried about screens, the test isn't whether we can take them away. Almost anyone can do that. The test is whether we know what we're handing a kid instead, in the ten seconds after the phone goes in the basket.

A book. Something to be held, felt, tasted, lived, and smelt. But also evaluated, juxtaposed, reviewed, and discussed, until it rises above its own name. Not necessarily in a classroom. Not necessarily in any context at all. This is where the path of a lifelong reader actually starts, not reading for grades, and not even for knowledge, but for joy.

Which is, usually, my final answer to a worried parent.