The book industry has already endured three shocks: the ebook broke the fetish of paper, social media reduced attention spans to minutes, and AI now not only writes but also summarizes.
A book is no longer a complete object to be consumed but a mine of fragments to be distilled into podcasts, threads, or videos. Active reading—highlighting, thinking, connecting—gets outsourced to machines.
Writers face a dilemma: do they write for people to read or for algorithms to process and shred into highlights?
The paradox is that AI democratizes access to ideas while trivializing the experience of reading them.
The likely future is that deep reading becomes a contrarian luxury while algorithmic summaries feed the cultural diet of the masses.
The question that remains to be answered is whether books will continue to be a product or become a ritual, or even more so, an act of rebellion by critical thinkers.
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