In October 2024, American videographer Jared Henderson posted a video titled Why Everyone Stopped Reading, which went viral and amassed nearly four million views. In a later clarification published on August 9, 2026, Henderson admitted that some of his initial statements were incorrect or overly categorical, and he aimed to correct them. He re-examined several widely disseminated figures around American literacy, which more broadly refers to the ability to understand and use writing. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 79 % of American adults reached at least level 2 of the PIAAC, a major international OECD survey on adult skills in reading, math, and problem-solving. The remaining 21 % were not necessarily illiterate but included individuals who could not be assessed for various reasons. The PIAAC 2023 data indicated that 28 % of American adults aged 16 to 65 are at level 1 or below, compared to 19 % in 2017, though the NCES cautions against direct comparisons between the surveys. A 2025 study published in iScience based on 236,270 people surveyed between 2003 and 2023 showed that reading for pleasure is becoming less frequent in the United States. The share of people who reported having read for their pleasure during the studied day dropped from about 28 % in 2004 to 16 % in 2023. The decline is not uniform, with growing gaps according to educational level and income. Federal statistics from 2025 extend this observation: Americans aged 15 and over spend an average of 16 minutes per day on personal reading, compared to 2 hours and 36 minutes on television. Among those aged 15-24, reading drops to about ten minutes per day. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 48.5 % of adults had read at least one printed or digital book in 2022, compared to 54.6 % in 2012. For novels and short stories, the proportion dropped from 45.2 % to 37.6 %. A Pew survey, however, gives a less gloomy picture: 75 % of adults say they have read or listened to all or part of at least one book in 2025. There is no contradiction: reading a few pages or listening to a book once a year is not the same as making reading a regular practice. One of the most striking figures concerns Bleak House by Charles Dickens. A study published in 2024 asked 85 English literature students from two universities in Kansas to read and rephrase the first seven paragraphs of the novel. 49 out of 85 students, or 58 %, understood too little of the passage to be able, according to researchers, to continue the novel easily on their own. Only four, about 5 %, provided a detailed understanding. The result is striking, but its limitations are important: small sample, only two institutions, a difficult 19th-century text. Most importantly, the experiment dates back to 2015, which does not allow attributing this difficulty to TikTok or ChatGPT. Henderson now distinguishes two phenomena: some students really have difficulty understanding complex texts, others are capable but read few entire books and lack training in long reading. In a 2024 survey, Rose Horowitch interviewed 33 professors from major American universities. Many described students less accustomed to finishing books and more overwhelmed by the volume of reading required. At Columbia, Nicholas Dames recounted that a student had told him she had never had to read an entire book in high school. Horowitch acknowledged, however, that no national study allows extending these testimonies to all American students. A study published in 2000, on 910 psychology students followed between 1981 and 1997, already noted a clear decline in required reading. The smartphone can therefore reinforce the phenomenon, but it did not create it. Jared Henderson also corrects one of the pillars of his 2024 video. He explained at the time that American schools had abandoned phonics in favor of whole language, causing a drop in reading level. In his 2026 revision, he acknowledges that the chronology does not allow directly attributing the national evolution of results to this pedagogical change. The National Reading Panel, a scientific commission created at the request of the U.S. Congress, concluded on the effectiveness of systematic teaching of the correspondence between letters and sounds. But it also recalled that decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension must be worked on together. Recent results remain poor. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a major federal evaluation nicknamed The Nation's Report Card, plays an important role in a country without a unique national school program. According to the 2024 results, reading scores have declined among 4th grade and 8th grade students - approximately CM1 and fourth grade - as well as at the end of high school. Habits follow the same slope: according to data published in 2026, only 14 % of 13-year-olds read for their pleasure almost every day, compared to 35 % in 1984. In American schools, short texts, informational documents, and exercises intended for standardized assessments have gradually taken more space. The No Child Left Behind Act, a federal law adopted in 2002, strongly developed standardized testing. The Common Core, launched starting in 2010 and adopted by many states, sets common standards in English and mathematics. These reforms are sometimes accused of favoring excerpts over entire works. Their responsibility remains debated, but the difference between the two practices is real: reading 400 pages requires maintaining a narrative structure in memory, enduring passages less immediately rewarding, and maintaining attention for several hours or several days. Social networks, short videos, notifications, and infinite scrolling now occupy every available moment. They constitute an obvious competition for a book, which requires precisely to stay with the same object without constant stimulation. But since the decline of some reading practices was already documented in the 1980s and 1990s, the smartphone appears more as an accelerator than as a unique cause. Rose Horowitch pushes this reflection further in The End of Reading Is Here. She mentions a "post-literary" society: not a world without writing, but a world in which long text would no longer be the dominant support for informing, reflecting, or entertaining. We continue to absorb an enormous number of words, but in the form of messages, comments, notifications, or summaries. Reading this succession of fragments is not exactly the same activity as following for three hundred pages a thought or a narrative. If Americans simply abandoned the book, the market should collapse. However, in 2025, the sales points tracked by Circana BookScan sold 762.4 million printed books, a slight 0.3 % increase year-on-year. Adult fiction continues to benefit from romance and BookTok, the community of readers and book prescribers on TikTok. Even paradoxically on the part of independents: the American Booksellers Association states that its memberships have increased by 19 % in 2025 and that 605 physical, mobile, or temporary bookstores have opened that year. Pew notes that 14 % of adults say they have read more than twenty books in 2025, while a quarter have read none. Does France follow the movement? It would be tempting to make it an American particularity. The French figures invite caution. According to the 2025 CNL barometer, 63 % of French people had read at least five books in the previous twelve months, six points less than in 2023. Even more revealing for attention: 27 % of readers do something else while reading. Among those aged 15-24, this proportion reaches 53 %. According to the 2026 CNL study, 7-19 year olds spend an average of 18 minutes per day on leisure reading, compared to 3 hours and 1 minute on screens, excluding digital and audio books. Among those aged 16-19, screen time exceeds five hours per day and 67 % declare doing something else while reading. The real question is therefore not whether Americans and French people still read - they read all day - but what, for how long, and with what attention. And, in an economy where this attention is increasingly contested, what place can the book still hold?