Reading: The End of Reading Is Here
By: Rose Horowitch Related tags: #ReadingCrisis
Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.
I'm not a fan of this starting position. A great loss was the Library of Alexaindria, but not so great a loss that no one ever studied again. While there are mentions of the collections that were in the Library, there's also an implication that a centralised location to study was necessary or required.
Also, and this is just me being picky, but we're not sure exactly how much was lost in the burning of the library. This is because scholars who were at the library fled to other cities and took things with them. Other things may not have been destroyed at all and were relocated elsewhere (or partially rebuilt).
Like all good things, the library was probably less destroyed by an actual burning and more destroyed by lack of funding. (Oh, parallels modern libraries, interestingly.) [Note: This point is sort of made in the article. I'm apparently impatiently pedantic.]
Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages.
This makes me want to dig deeper on this. I struggle with actually believing this to be seen as such a great loss (or that it was weaponised as a great loss in largely propagandistic usage).
Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it.
... If we had to copy books by hand to avoid them deteriorating due simply to age and the environment, don't you think that the act of preservation would also fall to the side and be seen as a Sisyphean task? Especially in the libraries of today that seem to run on five people and the lowest funding possible? (Something that probably fed into that negligence of the Library of Alexandria.)
The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.
Moral as fact. Provide some evidence?
Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again.
... Oh, fuck off with this shit. The only way that this is a dark age is because the billionaire class is creating it, and they are supposedly the “most literate” of all.
According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.
... When talking about stats, they end up linking to this article about gender splits in reading. I feel a rabbit hole opening up beneath me. They do not, however, link the report for those stats.
Only 38 percent read a novel or short story.
I have some questions about the basis of these statistics. How many of these people are reading other sources that are text-heavy? And also, if there is a decline in reading books, how many people in the past who read books... weren't inundated with text-based communication (emails, articles, etc) on a daily basis? A lot of people read, but they're not reading (because our understanding of 'reading' only encompasses some text-based materials).
A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.)
First, ebooks are... books. Also, interesting to include listening to an audiobook in a conversation about reading. Genuinely. Though, I think that would also open up other avenues for “reading” (like longform podcasts and video essays), and that would improve those numbers.
Reading and reading for pleasure are two different tasks, and I hope the study asked why it was that people weren't reading for pleasure (which people who are time or energy poor don't often do as much as other people).
I also have to wonder if quality of media was included, especially considering the state of any kind of print media. And now that they are releasing AI-generated books with stolen artwork... how much does that make people want to read them?
Anyway, this quote uses this article as evidence (which does have the paper in iScience... something to explore).
The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago.
... Does that inherently mean the book is simpler? A short sentence can be complex. It could also be that modern grammar promotes shorter sentences for clearer communication. (Also, a century ago? Writers were getting paid by the word for serialised stories in newspapers. I wonder if that impacts our research somehow.)
Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature.
... That doesn't make any sense. These two points don't connect. It's like saying spaghetti today is shorter than it historically was because people had more inclination to eat a more serious meal.
Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”
As the author points out, Doctor Zhivago is a... translation of a work. Perhaps the sentence structure in a translation might also be related to the feeling that the original language gave? Translation is a different field altogether and requires multiple points of information.
I'd also argue that this is, in English, not a great sentence. It's just long. Who knows if other translations of the same book would handle it better. (To step into the weeds of translation, someone ought go check out the shit Emily Wilson got over The Odyssey and all the people who are up themselves that her translation feels wrong because it's not written in an faux archaic English.)
Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults.
... So? Your point? Adults can read fiction that is “beneath” them. We don't have to always read Serious Literature™.
Not to mention that this chief librarian cannot guarantee that all the adults taking books out aren't doing it for children and teenagers they live with (or to read it with them).
The most popular novel written for adults was the romantasy adventure Onyx Storm. Whatever the book’s pleasures, it isn’t Pasternak: “A muscle in his square jaw ticks as he stares down at me, rippling the tawny-brown skin of his stubbled cheek.”
... So, just say you don't like smutty books and get over it. You're comparing two separate kinds of sentences from two books that likely have little overlap.
And once again: Onyx Storm was written in English first. Doctor Zhivago's TRANSLATION wasn't written by Pasernak. This is comparing apples with potato curry.
Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did.
SO? We've been watching TV since the 1960s. We were listening to news on the radio before that, too. What's your point? No one except the haters to read your shitty Atlantic articles?
In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day.
Here's a free line of inquiry from someone who was a kid in the 90s and has grown up to be an adult now: What happened to local newspapers? What happened to the number of newspapers available? What happened to print media? I remember that local news was pretty popular and that people used to deliver papers to our house when I was a kid. But then a lot of local newspapers seemed to stop doing that as I got older. I wonder why that is. Hmmm.
I'm sure the closures of multiple local news outlets has nothing to do with one's ability to access a newspaper.
Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.
This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis.
... Reading on your phone or laptop is bad now? Also, a lot of people have always liked LISTENING TO (or watching) the news. In factories, one person would take the position of reader and read out the news to the people working on the floor.
This shit ain't new.
In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument.
Not to be That Person, but I've literally watched teachers teach to tests and not teach any skills. Sooo... I wonder if there's something that we've done to the curriculum to decrease these skills?
NOTE: Nearly all the links referenced do not take you to the evidence that a person would be inclined to believe they do.
People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.
You know, I think the culture cultivated by the companies running this trash are to blame. We could've had slow social media, which would force people to stop and think before they responded (for example). But that wouldn't make money to companies like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
I don't think this is that people are choosing not to devote sustained attention; it's that they've been trained not to, and breaking that habit is hard.
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing.
Sorry, but this just means you also think that they're losing the ability to think deeply full stop. Adding “about writing” is kind of meaningless here.
America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
Moral panic structure. Oooooh, scary.
Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.)
First, who cares. If they don't know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, their lives aren't over. They're toddlers. This literally is meaningless and sounds more like teachers doing a KIDS THESE DAYS.
You know what, a lot of teenagers don't know Back to the Future. Should I be outraged? Or just realise that there are other movies out there and that they haven't gotten there yet (if ever)?
A lot of kids probably know other stories. Frustratingly, my nephew (who is 3 at time of writing) knows the transphobic book series by she who must not be named. I don't know if he knows fairy tales; I don't think he does. His parents (and grandparents and aunts) like OTHER THINGS.
And if you want parents to read to kids, LET THEM BE AT HOME WITH THEIR KIDS. People who are time poor DO NOT HAVE TIME, good grief. Atlantic writers seem to fail to understand reality, but no one's doing a moral panic on them.
From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.
Because they're reading shit they don't want to read. School literally trains you that READING ISN'T FUN. Why are you pretending their aversion to it is weird?
Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)
Time-honoured tradition of educators cherry-picking the one student who makes a good flub and pretends they're the norm.
Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text.
This also reads like the same cherry-picking. (Also, students at Harvard are more likely to be less rigorous. It's part of that class dynamic where wealthy people, who already have access to avenues of prestige and status, aren't really interested in doing more... unless it's to help ruin the lives of all the people beneath somehow. I've worked with enough wealthy families to know that they mostly encourage this behaviour.)
Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice.
Yeah, we know they left nothing behind in the form of ARTWORK or DRAWINGS. We also know they never used HAND SIGNALS or SIGN LANGUAGES.
This is just privileging reading over other things.
The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of.
Prove that it altered the “intellectual feats they were capable of.”
We also know that oral traditions have a pretty high recall of the material they pass on (and that it allows stories to be maintained and adapted rather than made permanent).
It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.
I mean, we already have civilizational mythologies... So exactly what has reading done to stop that?
Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether.
This is all your perspective, and it's wrong. I can see an author's name and still recognise them and what their writing will likely do. How is that a “dispassionate spread of information?”
Sure, writing takes longer than speaking, but our brains have also developed interesting mechanisms to help us form sentences as we're thinking. It's why we occasionally get sentences of mixed grammars because we switched in the middle; that doesn't mean we're not thinking. If anything, it proves we are but that we missed something.
What's your evidence about complex sentence structure, btw?
And oral traditions haven't “disappeared into the ether” with the exception of colonisation and genocide of the people doing it. Let's now think about what the hyperfocus on reading might be categorised as.
This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries.
Your evidence is...?
“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Walter J. Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. He argued that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.
I wonder if Jesuit priests helped to undermine societies at any point in time, assisting in colonial projects.
What's his evidence, then? Maybe it allowed for “new kinds of thought,” but can y'all prove it?
Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
So a Soviet researcher went to colonised peoples and didn't dare consider that their differing answers might be a result of cultural indoctrination into Soviet society?
And that, even now, this “lover of words” who writes for The Atlantic can't read the passage she's quoting and see the colonialism inherent in it?
I'd say that says way more than she's capable of saying in words alone.
Later scholars would attribute some of these new modes of thinking to other aspects of living in a literate society, not to reading alone. But Ong’s larger argument stands: Print cultures value lengthy, organized arguments.
That's not inherently true. What we define as organised changes based on our understandings. Also, lengthy arguments aren't inherently good or valuable. They're just long.
“Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist—all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading,” Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The advent of reading and writing was a precondition for philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism.
I see I'm going to have to spend some time in the mines with Postman. I downloaded his work earlier, and now I'm probably going to have a lot of fun.
... But reading was a PRECONDITION for PHILOSOPHY? And art criticism? Lmao.
These changes were hugely destabilizing. As literacy spread through societies, it contributed to political upheaval and revolutions. In the American colonies, the leaders of the patriot cause employed newspapers and pamphlets to foment anti-British sentiment.
Regardless of side, this is called PROPAGANDA. Interesting you don't talk about that at all.
Also, questions: WHO WAS ALLOWED TO WRITE? AND WHOSE VOICE WENT SILENT?
In the 19th century, composing a letter was an art form, and even correspondence with loved ones was written in an elegant, formal style. “It’s weird for us to see it now: a Civil War soldier writing to his wife, and he’s covered with mud in this tent, and he writes as if he’s Shakespeare,” John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, told me. “And you think, Can’t he loosen up with his own wife? But the thing is, that is him basically sending her roses.”
... Or it's how he was? And people think old writing is just better because it sounds archaic to us now. Which is a thing people believe. Even if it's not inherently correct.
Samuel D. Lougheed served in the 8th Regiment of the Union’s Missouri Volunteer Infantry, which fought at Shiloh and the Siege of Vicksburg. In October 1862, he wrote to his wife: “Tis hard to lie down covered with your own gore on a battle field and die. Tis hard to see the mighty prancing war horse, trampling the dying and dead beneath their merciless feet. No dear wife, near to speak a word of comfort. No living sister or Mother to administer relief in that hour the most sad in the history of humanity. O the humanity. O the horrors of war.”
... He writes like Shakespeare because he says 'tis and not it's? Like, change some of those, and it sounds normal as fuck. “It's hard to lie down covered with your own gore...” It sounds way less formal and archaic just by changing ONE WORD.
These arguments suck.
The endless scroll, hyperlinks, and notifications invite surface-level reading, with constant invitations to look elsewhere.
... Irony in that this article is covered in hyperlinks.
Studies have shown that people comprehend less when reading on a digital device than on paper, perhaps because of all these distractions.
Maybe we could look at the culture of the vultures in tech companies and place some blame there? Nah. We need their dollars and access passes.
Audiobooks have become a popular alternative to print books at least in part because listening to a book allows for multitasking: You can read while doing the dishes or driving to work.
HEY, WHY MIGHT PEOPLE TURN TO OPTIONS THAT ENABLE MULTITASKING? I wonder if there's a class analysis here!
Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year.
First, I think I assigned maybe 4 books per year. But this ignores all the other reading (short stories, plays, poems, articles, etc) that happens in an English class. (Also keep in mind that, as the teacher, however many classes I have? I'm doing all that reading. All of it. And even re-reading takes time.)
Second, I have met English teachers who assign zero books because they literally have no time to read book-length works in their own classes. But I've also met some who do it out of laziness. It's a mixed bag.
And schools don't fucking pay, so that's a lot of extra overtime that no one gets paid for.
HAVING A CLASS ANALYSIS OF A THING MIGHT IMPROVE YOUR ARGUMENT SOMEWHAT, HOROWITCH.
Lupita Villalobos, who teaches 3-year-olds at a pre-K in Duncanville, Texas, told me that the district gives each student a tablet to use during school. She’s prevented her students from using the devices, as she knows how much time they spend on them at home. “I had a student who had a very strong reaction to starting school,” she said. “Typically, students cry maybe the first couple weeks and say they want their mom. But this student would cry for her tablet.”
Again, the cherry-picking of students. And the writer using them as a moralising factor.
Even text messages have taken on characteristics of the spoken word. People use all caps to indicate heightened emotion and avoid the formality of proper punctuation, which now seems stilted, even stern. Like many 20-somethings, my friends and I have mostly moved on from texts, preferring to send one another voice recordings instead.
Have we considered voice notes are easier than texting on a phone? Like, full stop. This isn't negative.
Also, we have always used text in this manner? It's not new? That's part of the art of writing?
NOTE: There are too many Harvard professors here. One would think this article is better placed on students and educators there.
Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding.
Or you could be rewarded with the past three months of my reading where you read one good book and a lot of others that suck and feel like a waste of time.
In a 2024 survey of third-to-eighth-grade teachers, more than 80 percent said that their students’ reading stamina had declined since 2019.
I wonder how many of these surveys of teachers actually compare what they think to what is real, especially since teachers are prone to fallacious thinking about generational superiority (“kids these days”).
That students would struggle with unfamiliar references is not surprising. But the researchers gave them access to the entire internet. They could have looked up Michaelmas term or Lord Chancellor or Lincoln’s Inn Hall if they had chosen to do so. Students didn’t even know how to go about figuring out what they didn’t understand, or they didn’t bother. Most of them did not realize that the passage takes place in a court of law. Only 5 percent had an accurate, detailed understanding of what they’d read.
Were they aware they could use the internet? Would that even have helped them (because Google sucks)? What were the limits on their internet use?
And sorry, but even as a person who knows Bleak House, I can undersand someone not knowing the one paragraph provided took place in a courtroom because “Inn Hall” sounds like it'd be a hall at the inn; if many people are using the context clues they have (and this passage gives very few that aren't temporal or regional in nature), they're probably going to assume “Inn Hall” is a place to stay that exists in Lincoln. Which is fucking reasonable.
I also don't know the research, so I can't really comment on more than my immediate reactions to the way it's presented here.
Recent studies suggest that the Flynn effect—the steady rise in IQ between generations since the 1930s—has reversed over the past two decades. Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade, Elizabeth Dworak, a research psychologist at Northwestern’s medical school, told me.
IQ is meaningless and its creator would hate how it's used now. Probably especially this usage.
Could the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds be developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undetectable cognitive brilliance? Perhaps. But for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that.
Prove that it's more rational, analytical, and sophisticated.
Bards in oral societies make use of stock phrases and mnemonics to keep track of their train of thought. They traffic in epithets and “enthusiastic description of physical violence,” in Ong’s words, because conflict is more memorable than dispassionate discussion.
Reminder that Ong was a fucking Jesuit priest, and they (the Jesuits) engaged in multiple colonisation campaigns dressed as social improvements. This means that this perspective is likely tied to what he learned within the religion.
Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements.
Not all of us do this and most people correct their mistakes.
It is unlikely that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Orality and Literacy. But if he did, he might recognize himself in Ong’s description. Trump’s communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe”—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!”
Ah, lmao. Here's where all the THESE THINGS BAD comes in. Weird liberal takes made more absurd by trying to create a false equivalence and a rejection of reality.
“More than in the past, authorities today must often ‘look and sound good’ rather than write and reason well,” Meyrowitz wrote in No Sense of Place. He predicted that the decline of print and rise of electronic media would ultimately push people toward populist leaders.
Haven't read the book, but what's his excuse for bad politics before? Just accidental blips?
Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them.
Writing is a way. One. Not the (only).
Email was supposed to be a more convenient substitute for faxes, phone calls, and meetings. Instead, responding to emails became an immense time suck of its own. These unforeseen consequences end up transforming intellectual life.
Okay, but again. The culture of immediacy has some blame here? It'd be just as overwhelming if I received a bunch of mail, some junk, that I had to sort through and then respond to right away.
... We're not going to consider how push notifications ruined the usefulness of a lot of things?
AI produces crisp, professional prose. Presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of the machines.
This sounds like a problem of academia and its culture, if I'm honest.
Perhaps inevitably, such statements have become the stuff of online ridicule: Brandish a book too ostentatiously in public, and you might find yourself accused of “performative reading.”
I usually have someone ask me what I'm reading or if it's good. Sometimes people ask me if I actually speak English (usually other English-speakers), which is weird because I'm reading a book that is obviously in English (in a non-English country).
Then there are the older people who tell me they're proud of me for reading, which is very cute but also strange.
I've never been ridiculed for it. Does Rose think this is common?
This dynamic makes figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture.
But Mr Beast has a self-insert book with James Patterson!
Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers.
I think more than anything? They want jobs where they can just not struggle (and misunderstand what being an influencer is... think of all the people who wanted to be celebrities decades ago or now). They, like most of us, want an easier life than we know we're stuck with.
Nearly two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day.
Horrible idea, btw.
I was raised in the postliterate era. I was born shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released.
“I weep for a time I didn't experience and pretend to know.”
In the years since—I’m not quite sure when—the habit slipped. The change was subtle. I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages. What did it matter if I read less? No one was checking on my progress. And the books would always be there. I could pick them up later.
... “I became busier.” I wonder if that impacts your decisions...
Nowadays, even the most obscure academic monographs are scanned and digitized. Google Books and the Internet Archive represent libraries of unfathomable proportions. We can navigate to them with a few keystrokes, not a perilous journey across the Mediterranean. There’s little risk of their texts succumbing to humidity or mice.
Someone, who writes for a living, seems to have not kept up with the many news stories about Internet Archive. And is also ignoring how Google loves killing their own products, regardless of its utility.
Yeah, humidity and mice won't get them, but the climate crisis and print publishers will.
Not to mention, IA deletes things without notifying uploaders. So information can be and is often lost.