What is the Future of Reading?

I have been a teacher for many years, and in that time I have watched the landscape of reading shift in ways that would once have been difficult to imagine.

Children who once curled up with books now scroll through short videos before they have finished breakfast. Parents who read to their children at bedtime increasingly wonder whether an audiobook counts just as well. And now, at the moment AI is arriving in earnest into our daily lives, I find myself thinking about this question more urgently than ever.

What is the future of reading? And does it matter if we stop doing it for ourselves?

I believe it matters enormously. Here is why.

The Difference Between Hearing a Book and Reading One

Audiobooks are wonderful in many ways. They have opened literature to people who struggle with print, they make long journeys bearable, and a brilliant narrator can bring a story alive in ways that feel genuinely moving. I would never dismiss them entirely.

But there is a meaningful difference between hearing a book and reading one, and I do not think we talk about it honestly enough.

When you read, you are doing something active and deeply personal. You are decoding, interpreting and constructing meaning simultaneously. You set the pace. Your eyes move forward, and research shows they also move back, pausing, rechecking, confirming. This self directed rhythm, which happens almost invisibly as you read, is one of the things that sharpens comprehension and embeds information into memory. Reading anchors text to a place on a page, and that spatial quality helps us retain what we have read in ways that audio simply cannot replicate.

When you listen to an audiobook, someone else is doing a great deal of that interpretive work for you. The narrator’s pace becomes your pace. Their intonation tells you what is significant, what is comic, what is sorrowful. Their voice becomes the internal voice of the story. It is a fundamentally different cognitive experience, and it is a less demanding one.

Think of the analogy most readers will recognise immediately: watching a film after reading the book. The film is rarely as rich. Not because the filmmakers lacked talent, but because the version you built in your own imagination, from the words on the page, was more layered, more personal, more yours. An audiobook sits somewhere between the two. The story is there, but the deep imaginative construction is partly outsourced.

The Future of Reading – Vocabulary

There is also the question of vocabulary. Rich literary prose, at its best, carries a density of language that narrators must pace through. Listeners, especially those doing something else at the same time, driving, cooking, walking, may absorb less of that linguistic complexity than they realise. The reader who pauses at an unfamiliar word, goes back to reread a sentence, sits with a paragraph, that reader is building vocabulary and comprehension in ways that passive listening rarely achieves. Research consistently shows that the average adult reads at around 250 to 300 words per minute, while recommended speaking speed for high comprehension sits at only 150 to 160 words per minute, meaning that reading is not only deeper, but faster.

Why This Moment Is Different

We have always had competing formats for stories and information. That is not new. What is new is the scale and speed at which AI and assistive technology are now curating our knowledge for us.

We are entering a world in which AI will read for us, summarise for us, speak to us, and make decisions about what information we are likely to want next. It will smooth the path between us and knowledge in ways that feel helpful, and often are. But there is a risk built into that smoothing, and it is one I think every parent and educator needs to understand.

When AI curates what we know, it also, however subtly, shapes what we think. The ability to read for ourselves, to sit with a text and draw our own conclusions, to notice what has been omitted, to evaluate an argument on its own terms, these are not skills that will become less important in an AI saturated world. They will become more important. Possibly the most important skills we can cultivate.

Reading is not passive. It is one of the most analytical things a human being does. When we read, we are constantly comparing what is on the page with what we already know, questioning, inferring, forming opinions. That process happens at a deeper level with written text than with audio. It happens most deeply of all with print. And it is this capacity, to read carefully, think independently, and form our own views, that AI cannot do on our behalf, however sophisticated it becomes.

Never has independent reading felt quite so much like an act of intellectual self determination.

The Short Form Problem

Alongside the rise of AI, we are also navigating a profound shift in how information and entertainment are served to children and adults alike. Short form video content has become the dominant diet for a generation of young people. Thirty second clips, fast cuts, instant reward. The algorithmic feed is designed to hold attention, but not to sustain it. There is a difference.

Sustained reading requires a particular kind of patience that is increasingly unfamiliar to young readers. That patience is not innate. It is built, gradually, through practice. And if children are not practising it, they are losing it.
A deliberate return to real books, physical books, read at a table or in a quiet chair, without a screen nearby, is not nostalgia. It is a genuinely radical act in the current climate, and one with significant consequences for intelligence, analysis and the love of reading itself.

A Word on Assistive Technology

I want to be clear about something. Assistive technology, including text to speech, audiobooks and AI reading tools, has genuine and important value for children who find the volume or pace of reading in school a significant challenge. For children with dyslexia, visual processing difficulties, or those managing a heavy curriculum load, these tools can remove real barriers and allow them to access stories and information they might otherwise miss entirely. That matters, and I would never want a child to feel excluded from literature because of the format it arrives in.
But assistive technology is most powerful when it sits alongside reading, not instead of it. For children who can read, the habit of reading words on a page, slowly, attentively, independently, is one worth protecting and nurturing, even when other options feel easier or more convenient.

A Final Thought

We are standing at a threshold. AI will read the world for us if we let it. Short form content will fill every quiet moment if we allow it. And in that context, choosing to read, really read, with focus and patience and a physical book in hand, is a more countercultural act than it has ever been.

The internal reading voice that develops through years of practice with print is not something AI can replicate or replace. It is the voice through which we think, question, analyse and understand. It is, in many ways, the voice of our own intelligence.

Helping children build that voice, through books, through reading together, through the quiet pleasure of a story, is one of the most important things any family or educator can do.

Not because technology is the enemy. But because independent thought never goes out of fashion.

Kae Ormerod is a qualified teacher, SENCO and founder of Elite Tutors. If you would like support with your child’s reading, literacy or learning at home, we are always here. Get in touch any time.