The Atlantic says we’re entering the postliterate era. I think we’re at a fork in the road.

Rose Horowitch’s cover story in the August issue of The Atlantic is the best thing I’ve read this year on the future of reading. Her diagnosis is sobering: fewer than half of American adults read a book in 2022. Reading comprehension is declining across every age group and education level. And AI, she warns, may finish the job — students already use chatbots to avoid the “burdensome medium” of books entirely.

But her closing line is the one that stays with me: “An astonishing wealth of information and wisdom has been bequeathed to us. What we’ll do with this inheritance is up to us.”

That’s the question we built Citations to answer.

The pessimistic view is that LLMs are the final wedge between people and books — a summary machine that makes the source obsolete. We see it differently. Used well, an LLM can be the front door back INTO the book.

Imagine asking a question and getting a synthesized answer — then clicking through to the actual passages, in the actual work, with the author and publisher attributed and compensated. Reading the surrounding pages. Asking the book questions. Testing your own comprehension. Seeing a visual map of the book’s ideas. And when you want the whole thing, finding it at your local library or bookstore in one tap.

That’s not a replacement for reading. It’s an on-ramp — a discovery and learning assistant that treats the summary as the beginning of engagement, not the end of it.

Horowitch is right that the threat isn’t the disappearance of texts. It’s apathy toward them. The answer to apathy isn’t nostalgia — it’s building experiences that make deep reading feel worth it again, on infrastructure that respects the people who create the knowledge in the first place.

The inheritance is ours. Let’s not leave it in the vault.

Rose Horowitch essay, “The End of Reading Is Here”:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/