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Comment by irisflower95 | Hacker News Reader

We are talking less about books now. The number of book mentions in the site peaked in 2022 and has been decreasing steadily. Is this another effect of LLMs?

For all books, I summed their # of mentions across the years. The data show an increasing trend, peaking in 2022 and then decreasing since then:

2007: 1,062

2008: 3,248

2009: 5,206

2010: 8,942

2011: 8,330

2012: 8,200

2013: 9,808

2014: 10,436

2015: 12,618

2016: 14,173

2017: 15,231

2018: 18,001

2019: 17,928

2020: 19,613

2021: 19,996

2022: 22,797

2023: 20,178

2024: 16,103

2025: 13,738

2026*: 11,482

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The reading crisis is a global thing. It is likely linked more to the rise of social media than to the advent of the current AI era, and it doesn't look like it's changing anytime soon. We might be heading into an illiterate age.

why is it a crisis ? because "longer is better" ?

proverbs wouldn't have stood the test of time if they were books.

The functions of a proverb and a book are completely different, I have no idea what you're going for with that comparison.

How would they know?! They've never read a book!

the reading "crisis" was being attributed to low attention span - LLMs / Reels whatever can condense a lot of content into high density highlights.

I'm countering that saying most books are too verbose to be worth the time spent reading them.

"Illiterate is an adjective and noun that primarily describes a person who has little or no formal education and is unable to read or write." More like functionally illiterate - lack of critical thinking, common sense and factual knowledge, an inability to parse complex ideas, and poor writing skills.

It's getting pretty bad. I am at a point now where if I have to ask someone working in a store for help, I actively avoid anyone that looks to be under the age of 30. I can't take another Gen-Z stare.

The number of people who are reporting that they read every single day has only gone up in the past 30 year (~25% of people in Denmark read everyday).

It is a problem that 30% of those who do not read are reporting that it's because they can't focus on ready, but that number might have been the same through out the years.

Another theory is that around that time the people who value good writing got so annoyed at the AI spam that they left

without normalizing for number of distinct HN users, as well as the possible incorporation of a new demographic to the site's readership that is less interested in books, but has always been present somewhere in the world, this trend doesn't actually say much. It says something about the website, news.ycombinator.com, but that isn't terribly relevant to anything.

The new demographic is probably vibe-coders, actually. These were people that were never much into reading. But because HN is generally AI adjacent, a person starting to vibe code or otherwise use AI tools will probably find HN in the sources and start using it because it shows up so frequently in forum listings.

So "WE" are probably still talking about books the same amount (pre LLMs-going-mainstream HN users), and the book trend is more of a latent eternal-September effect.

OK but what's the ratio of number of post to books mentioned?

I think the number per active yearly users would be even more interesting. Clearly there is a correlation with the traffic too. But I wouldn't be very surprised if the relative numbers were still in decline.

These numbers are meaningless unless we know the number of posts during those years.

Nice catch! Is it possible that HN traffic is going down?

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