New on the endangered species list: the bookworm

And as reading swerves in all directions and the 1950s "Book of the Month" clubs give way to Oprah Winfrey's book list, "grass roots" reading, and niche markets (think "chick lit"), Americans have a fainter sense of what they "should" read. The idea of a cultured person has broadened, says Tim Morris, an English professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, "eroding the notion that there is a central culture we all must subscribe to."

But perhaps the most profound shift behind the dying breed of bookworms is that Americans have less time - and a shrinking tolerance for solitude. "There are so many ways not to feel alone, where the one way used to be moving into a novel's imaginative space," says Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

As the wired, and wireless, world grows, the dominant culture is increasingly one of immediacy. "Why pick up Tolkien when you can spend three hours watching 'Lord of the Rings?' " asks Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research group in Washington. "Modern media is making us a Cliffs Notes nation."

In essential ways, experts say, reading simply feels less important. Early America saw literacy as a means to salvation: You learned to read in order to read the Bible, and that impetus was strong enough that New England joined Scotland as one of the first hubs of universal literacy. A few generations ago, "the whole idea of literacy was something parents thought to be terribly important because not everyone was literate," says Douglas Raybeck, an anthropologist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. "Now literacy is taken for granted."

That shift has been so profound, he continues, that technology now "meets people halfway," demanding less and less literacy as chores once completed through written correspondence can be done at the sound of a voice or the click of a mouse.

To many, the alarm bells have a familiar ring: In every age, societies lament their own decline; there is always "a mythologization of a past in which everyone was well-read, everyone debated, everyone went to the coffee shops," says Professor Fitzpatrick. So the goal, in that sense, is to look for new habits that give people the same satisfaction and knowledge that bookishness once instilled. People still interact and read, after all - just not through books. Web logs ("blogs"), Fitzpatrick says, may function in some ways like the old bildungsroman - episodic narratives of life and coming of age.

Perhaps the answer to literary anxiety, then, is to relax the hold on traditional forms: "Reading has been worked into the fabric of our lives through the Internet and all kinds of other media," she says. "We are reading all the time, just not reading in ways that might appear visually literary."

To a surprising extent, people are writing more, too. The NEA study found Americans doing more creative writing than ever - 30 percent more than 10 years ago. More models exist of the personal narrative, as memoir mania cuts into the fiction market and as blogs chronicle strangers' days from breakfast to bed.

Even the most desperate tragedy has its heroes and its denouement: Dante's "dark woods" of declining literacy has its rays of light, too. Public libraries, for one thing, have undergone a renaissance. The number of items libraries circulate has gone from 1.5 billion in 1991 to 1.8 billion today, though, admittedly, that circulation includes more CDs, DVDs, and videos.

Bookstores are changing as well, with more guests and author readings. They have become the "locus of cultural and civic activity in communities," says Rusty Drugan of the New England Booksellers Association. And then, there's Harry Potter. The NEA study didn't measure children's reading, but Mr. Drugan calls the Potter books "a real cultural phenomenon."

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