Here is a very smart piece by a high-school librarian, explaining what it means that kids don’t read as much as they used to. Make that, “don’t read as many books and essays” as they used to, and certainly not for pleasure. As he points out, we are all so overwhelmed with information, prose, and communications coming at us from so many directions in real time that it is a wonder that anyone reads anything dense, difficult, or constructed in long sentences with dependent clauses.