Books Are Not Consumables

How the Market Kills the Classics

I. The Illusion of Literacy as Status

Reading has become a form of clout-chasing for people who fear thinking.

In the modern world, a person need not read well to be praised for reading often. The display of book consumption has become a form of cultural currency, cheapened by the ease with which it is performed. Piles of unread titles, carefully arranged in home offices and Instagram carousels, now pass for taste. Lists of “top ten reads of the year” are shared like wine labels, with little expectation of depth, only the signal that one has drunk.

This performance thrives on velocity. A book must be conquered quickly to count. Page counts are tallied like steps on a smartwatch, and reading becomes a form of cardio for the anxious middle class, who fear being left behind by better-informed peers. The number of books read in a year has become a badge, and those who read slowly, who return to sentences, who reflect, are treated as if they have fallen behind in a race that should never have started.

No one brags about eating 300 meals in a month. But when it comes to books, quantity has replaced discernment. The ability to name a dozen authors has eclipsed the ability to understand one. This is not a sign of cultural health. It is a metric of decay.

To treat books as consumables is to reduce the act of reading to a hobby of accumulation. It rewards attention without retention. And it creates the illusion of literacy while destroying the conditions that make literacy worthwhile.

II. The Fraud of Being “Widely Read”

Reading widely without reading well produces a polymath of platitudes.

“Widely read” is a compliment given too easily. It should mean a person has grappled with the full breadth of human thought. Instead, it means they’ve skimmed dozens of titles with neither love nor understanding. They are like tourists boasting of countries visited but unable to recall a street name, a meal, a song.

There is no virtue in volume when comprehension is absent. In fact, the widely read are often the least insightful. Their minds are cluttered with summaries, slogans, and half-remembered theses. They speak in the tone of authority, but their thoughts are brittle. Like cheap plywood, their arguments collapse under scrutiny. The wide reading did not make them deep. It made them shallow in more places.

This is not accidental. Our cultural gatekeepers reward speed over subtlety. Bookfluencers peddle monthly reading goals. Universities assign more pages than minds can absorb. Employers applaud applicants who “keep up with literature,” as though good thought were a treadmill. The very institutions meant to elevate the intellect now encourage its mimicry.

To read well requires struggle. It requires sitting with discomfort, allowing a foreign mind to disturb yours. Few pursue that kind of reading. Fewer still are rewarded for it. Instead, mediocrity is mistaken for mastery because it moves quickly and wears the mask of familiarity.

A culture that praises the widely read over the well-read will inevitably confuse information with wisdom. And that confusion is fatal to judgment.

III. Bookmarks and Billboards

The market prefers readers who buy everything and understand nothing.

The idea that reading many books signals intelligence is not a belief. It is a sales tactic. Publishers depend on it. So do the influencers who push their sponsored lists, the platform algorithms that reward volume, and the schoolteachers who assign books they haven’t read themselves. The narrative persists because it makes the wheel spin.

A person who reads few books, but reads them well, is useless to the market. He doesn’t buy enough. He doesn’t click enough. He doesn’t post enough. The system prefers the compulsive reader with no taste. He buys because he fears falling behind. He reads for the image, not the insight. He is perfect.

The myth that “more books make you smarter” functions like a billboard in the brain. It sells the illusion of growth, while making growth impossible. Instead of wrestling with hard texts, people substitute motion for meaning. Instead of judgment, they cultivate appetite.

Publishers learned long ago that the ideal consumer is insecure. So they market books as self-improvement, as therapy, as status, as entertainment, as rebellion, as virtue. What they never market is silence, concentration, or contemplation. These do not sell.

A book is a conversation across centuries. But when it is reduced to a product, the conversation is silenced, and the book becomes a commodity like any other. The reader becomes a customer, and intelligence is rebranded as loyalty to the brand. The page is no longer a window. It becomes packaging.

IV. Quantity Worship Is a Plebeian Vice

Plebeians mistake loudness for importance and bulk for beauty.

The obsession with how many books one reads emerges from the same instinct that prizes big houses, long resumes, and overflowing grocery carts. It is the instinct of the tasteless. Those without discernment reach for number, because number is easy to count. It replaces the hard work of judgment with the soft comfort of accumulation.

A person who cannot evaluate beauty clings to price tags. Likewise, a person who cannot evaluate thought clings to page counts. The bulk of the bookshelf becomes proof of intellect, though it proves only anxiety.

This is the plebeian fallacy: to believe greatness is measured by scale. That more is better, always. That speed implies ability. That loudness implies depth. The elite of every civilization knew better. They passed down a few books, read deeply, returned to them. Their minds were trained not on novelty, but on clarity.

But a mass society cannot admit that quality is rare. So it exalts volume. It turns reading into a race and floods the market with books that are written to be consumed, not remembered. This is not an accident. It is a feature.

A culture without standards defaults to metrics. And metrics demand quantity. The result is a reading culture that no longer knows how to appraise. People read like they eat at a buffet: quickly, carelessly, with pride in excess.

In such a world, the man who reads slowly and chooses wisely is not admired. He is ignored. Because he reminds the crowd that they are reading without thinking.

V. The Alliance of Shallow Readers and Hungry Sellers

The reader is flattered into mediocrity so he keeps buying.

Publishers do not print books to elevate civilization. They print books to sell them. This is not corruption. It is commerce. But commerce, left alone, will always favor the appetites of the crowd. And the crowd wants what is easy.

The reader who exalts quantity over quality is not an independent agent. He is the target of a system built to flatter his vanity. His preferences align perfectly with the industry’s incentives. He wants to feel smart. They want to sell paper. Between these, a pact is formed.

The pact is sealed by metrics. Bestseller lists reward speed, not longevity. Social platforms promote what is posted, not what is pondered. Online retailers push endless sequels, bland derivatives, formulaic self-help tomes. All these exist to feed a consumer base that cannot distinguish between nourishment and filler.

In this system, the classics are dead weight. They do not move quickly. They require effort. They call the reader upward. Worse, they ask for loyalty beyond the transaction. A person who rereads Plato buys no new book. A person who understands Dostoevsky resists the messages of lesser writers. He is dangerous.

So the alliance endures: pedestrian values feed corporate profits, and corporate marketing flatters pedestrian values. They raise up influencers who confuse activity for depth, and reading logs for character. The consumer becomes a collector of covers, not a keeper of ideas.

And in this bargain, something priceless is lost: the idea that books exist to shape the soul, not decorate the ego.

VI. The Noise That Buries the Signal

The classics are not outdated. They’re outnumbered.

A culture that reads badly will soon write badly. And once it writes badly, it begins to think in slogans, speak in fragments, and live in confusion. The disease of superficial reading becomes a civilizational deficit. Literacy remains. Thought disappears.

The mass production of books has not led to a renaissance. It has led to glut. Every week, thousands of new titles arrive like fast fashion—briefly popular, quickly discarded. The shelf groans not from greatness, but from volume. And beneath that weight, the signal is lost.

It is no longer possible for the average reader to distinguish the timeless from the trendy. The noise is too loud. The signal, when it appears, is mistaken for a fault in the feed. A serious book, rightly written, now feels out of place. It does not conform to genre, platform, or dopamine schedule.

This is the final stage: when the structure of the literary world actively suppresses literary excellence. Not through censorship, but through saturation. The classics are not banned. They are drowned.

The tragedy is not merely aesthetic. It is civic. A people trained to read badly cannot govern themselves well. They absorb complexity poorly. They fail to detect lies. They crave entertainment over truth. And they reward those who tell them what they already think.

In a better order, books are not consumed. They are entered slowly, like sacred places. To treat them otherwise is to treat the mind as a stomach, not a temple. And temples collapse when fed on garbage.