Blog

NOTE: Is it too soon to pull out the, “It’s been a long year…” meme? O_o

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40% Of Americans Did Not Read a Single Book in 2025: The Latest Survey of American Reading Habits | Kelly Jensen

What the data shows is pretty eye-opening: 40% of Americans did not pick up a single book. Perhaps that’s worth spinning in a more positive light. Most Americans, 60%, did read a book in 2025.

Jensen has never seen a dataset she didn’t love to dive into, and she does a nice job here unearthing several notable insights from a recent YouGov poll on American reading habits. Reframing the headline’s clickbait framing to spotlight the positive in her opening paragraph instead was a great choice, and it gets better from there.

My favorite takeaway was one specifically for the segment of the publishing industry that loves to treat libraries like cannibalizing pirates: “The vast majority of those who read a physical book picked up a book that they already owned (84%).” Add access to ebooks and audiobooks through libraries and various consumer subscription services, and at any given moment most readers aren’t reading a book they bought from a bookstore that week, adding a huge caveat to every “bestseller” list.

One of my mantras at the day job is, “Backlist is frontlist; every book is a new book for most readers.” Industry darling BookTok has proven that for a few years now, but it’s something librarians (the original book influencers) have always known. As ebooks became more popular and library lending grew, I frequently argued that fighting consumer preference was a bad strategy, and that physical books needed to be worth owning to be worth buying, two things comics publishers have known for years — for better and worse.

Most avid readers are a relatively small percentage of American readers overall, many with aspirational TBRs it will take them years to get through, but they still buy and/or borrow more books to read and share with others. They’re the foundation of the book industry, more diverse than the typical reader stereotype, and are also often what Library Journal once called “power patrons” in the early days of the library ebook boom.

Much to every marketers’ chagrin, new books aren’t just competing with the hundreds of other new books that are published the same week (or month), they’re competing with literal thousands of others that are also available to readers in bookstores and libraries. And then there’s tens of thousands more to choose from in digital formats, many of which are also available through libraries. Every one of those books is “new” to the vast majority of potential readers, and even the most avid readers have to be selective at some point.

That’s not to mention other forms of reading, nor other forms of media — but that’s an old rant I won’t rehash this time.

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‘Books are going to take longer to get to libraries’: What Baker & Taylor’s demise means for comics | Gina Gagliano

“For many of us in libraries, it raises real concerns about access and equity in the comics market. We’ll need to work even harder to ensure readers can still discover the power of comics.”

Gagliano goes deep on this one, getting a range of insightful perspectives on the impact of B&T’s collapse on comics and libraries. Similar to Borders, the writing was on the wall for B&T for a while, but plenty of libraries and publishers were still caught off guard by its abrupt ending, especially after a deal that appeared to save them had been announced a couple of weeks before.

With last year’s similarly foreseeable collapse of Diamond (although no one predicted exactly how messy that situation would ultimately get), the comics business already had a rough road ahead, so losing an important partner in library distribution is likely to have additional ripple effects, especially for smaller publishers who can’t afford to absorb the loss of another set of physical books to legal shenanigans beyond their control.

It’s going to take a while for the existing alternatives to be able to support the gap B&T’s absence has created because most libraries outsourced some of their critical needs to distributors over the years, and none of the alternatives are prepared to absorb all of B&T’s customers right away. Even Amazon can’t just flip a switch to immediately become a primary partner, an option most libraries would be making a terrible decision to even entertain at this point. Sadly, many absolutely will, having learned nothing from pushing OverDrive to offer Kindle integration years ago, creating a backdoor for invaluable user data that’s absolutely been used against them.

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24 million fewer vehicles: One year of congestion pricing in New York City | Kristin Toussaint

Along with easing New York’s infamous gridlock, a goal of congestion pricing was to raise $15 billion for the MTA, which would go to new subway cars, buses, station accessibility, and so on. Already, the state has allocated $1.75 billion of congestion pricing revenue to transit projects, including modernizing subway signals. Outdated signals are a major cause of subway delays.

I haven’t had to commute regularly into Manhattan since 2019, but I did it for many years until then — from the Bronx and NJ — and it was never a fun experience. As bad as NJ Transit usually is, it still often beats driving in through either of the tunnels at any time, especially if you’re heading into, or through, midtown. We still drive in occasionally if there’s more than two of us, but I was a fan of the plan anyway, and I was glad it was finally implemented last year, particularly over the hypocritical objections of Phil Murphy.

Now, it’s great to see the results validating what supporters were pretty confident would happen. Notably, it was a claim they could confidently make because there was a ton of research to support it, and it’s been successfully done in many other cities — just not in the US yet, which is of course the only place that counts to most of the people who were against it. #cmonson

Shout-out to The War on Cars, my original gateway to learning more about congestion pricing, along with motonormativity and the “built environment” we all mostly take for granted. I’m not anti-car, but I do believe cities should be (re)designed for people first.

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How the MetroCard became an icon of design | Diana Budds

At a time when generic minimalism and the sheen of AI-generated graphics have taken over, its unmistakable graphics feel refreshing. And the fact that a 31-year-old fare payment system is still in circulation when most tech today becomes obsolete in a matter of months is a remarkable achievement.

I remember, and still fondly miss, subway tokens (the New York Transit Museum is a favorite). I’m old enough to have used a few different token designs before the MetroCard was introduced in 1994, and while I don’t miss fumbling in my pockets for change to buy a couple of them at a time, I wasn’t a fan of the MetroCard for a long time. I went from hating it to… well, hating it a little less, but partly because I had no choice as tokens were eventually phased out.

Tokens were annoying in a lot of ways, but at least they were more accessible to more people, including making the turnstiles easier to jump, something the MTA been aggressively trying to change for years, without much success. Now that the MetroCard is being phased out in favor of even more exclusive “tap and ride” options, it’s another reminder that the NYC I grew up in doesn’t exist anymore, and I get more comfortable letting it go with each passing year.

Nevertheless, Budds’ tribute to that stupid little card you had to hold just right for the swipe to register is a great read.

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‘Raising questions’ isn’t enough. The best films of the year took a stance | Aisha Harris

It seems the moment requires more than just presenting questions and what-ifs. It needs a stance, a commitment to an ethos and to the story it’s ostensibly trying to tell, and an honesty about consequences.

I was underwhelmed by Eddington, but appreciated it a bit more after seeing One Battle After Another. I loved Sinners and 28 Years Later way more than both of them, though, picking them as my co-favorites from last year. Harris nails what I couldn’t quite put my finger on in my brief commentary there, particularly with Anderson’s handling of Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia in OBAA‘s off-putting opening act.

She covers a range of movies, several of which I haven’t seen yet so I didn’t technically read the entire essay in an attempt to avoid spoilers. Her point is clearly made throughout, though, and it’s also a reminder that I used to enjoy her presence on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast and probably need to add that back to my feed, because I would love to hear their conversations about a few of these films.

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