A July 2026 article in The Atlantic makes one thing clear: reading is no longer a default habit for most Americans. Drawing a historical parallel, the article pins the Library of Alexandria’s demise not on war or fire but simply neglect. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages.” classics scholar Roger Bagnall says, but the very fact the library was allowed to die – destroyed by humidity, mice, and insects – that showed that the dark age had already arrived.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)’s 2022 survey isn’t pretty for reading and literacy in the US either. Half of surveyed adults reported not having read a book of any kind, and only 38 percent read a novel or short story. Another study that analyzed 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey (that’s right, a study of a study) found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure (read a book, e-book, magazine, or newspaper, or listened to an audiobook) fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, gambling has become a common leisure activity; in 2025, 57 percent of adults placed a bet.
And yet.
On a flight last week, I sat next to a mother who watched reels on her phone nonstop, while her middle-school-age daughter read a book. Silent book clubs are taking root in cities big and small, celebrities form reading groups, and publishers are enjoying record book sales. And what about the 2019 Gallup poll that found that the average American adult visited the library twice as often as they went to the movies?
In the New York Times, David Wallace Wells writes about his growing skepticism that reading is going extinct thanks to smartphones. Reality, Wells says, is messier than that easy conclusion and the result of a complicated social landscape.
What, then, are library professionals to do? Do we throw in the towel and convert our buildings to casinos? Revert to the trope of the library as a silent cathedral to the printed book?
The answer is very likely to keep heading down the bifurcated path we have traveled for more than ten years: create spaces that encourage reading, focus, and critical thinking and spaces for community gathering and relationship building. While these seem like two very different types of spaces, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
This means create environments where reading is easy, attractive, and socially supported. Lower the friction with quick access to curated collections, quiet places to focus, social reading programs, and digital platforms. Ditch the heavy wood tables and chairs for comfortable study areas and community living rooms. Create large event/meeting spaces where people can stand, stretch, and move.
Everyone who has ever worked in a public library knows it’s a very long road – sometimes decades – from thinking about optimal library spaces to funding and building them. A master facilities plan makes that road much easier to traverse, and in many cases shortens the way to funding. A solid plan:
• Helps library systems right‑size buildings, re-balance collections and programs, and align spaces with evolving community needs.
• Clarifies priorities, funding needs, and phased actions, which makes it easier for stakeholders and voters to invest in their library.
Allows communities to ask: “What kinds of spaces will actually make it easier for our residents to become and stay readers?”
Library leaders should treat facility master planning as part of their literacy and reading strategy, not just a capital improvement exercise. JLG’s team of library planners and designers have on-the-ground experience operating, planning and building libraries. We have helped communities travel the long road from dreams to funded buildings, designing campaigns that get funding measures passed.
So, let’s keep fighting the good fight, planning spaces where people want to spend time and connect with their neighbors, inviting them in with services and collections that turn them into readers, and remembering the work of planning and designing our public libraries may be one of the most hopeful things a community can do. JLG’s library master planning practice exists for exactly this moment: to help communities support the next generation of readers and thinkers.
