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I personally think the focus on attention span is a red herring.

Many good books don't require that much attention span, and putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.

Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published space opera if it brings them joy and insights.

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mingus88 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text

I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.

People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.

It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention

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stevenAthompson 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine.

This. Both movies and series are now FAR less popular (and profitable) than video games, and video games are far less popular than social media. Even the minority that still enjoys legacy media enjoys it WHILE consuming other media.

Movie theaters are in as much trouble as libraries, and blaming either of them for their decline in popularity without mentioning the root causes would be myopic.

The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought that lasts longer than the length of a TikTok video or tweet are dying.

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makeitdouble 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought

People aren't watching TikToks while video gaming. The rise of video games, and the success of narrative ones, should tell us that people engage with the content and focus. For hours at a time.

But they need to care about it, expect way more quality and are way less tolerant of mediocrity. That's sure not great for Hollywood producers, cry me a river.

Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places, IMHO they'll happily outlive movie theaters by a few centuries.

	▲	milesrout 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People definitely watch YouTube videos while playing video games and play games on their phones while watching TV/movies. Narrative video games are a tiny and obscure niche.

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alabastervlog 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m not sure if it’s true but I’ve heard that the reason so many streaming shows are like twice as long as they should be to best-serve their stories, and are so repetitive, is because they’re written for an audience that’s using their phones while they “watch”.

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EgregiousCube 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if it's not that people are getting dumber or less able to hold attention; rather, that everyone is being more exposed to lowest common denominator material because of efficient distribution.

Reader's Digest was always there on the shelf at the store and was very commercially successful. Most people who consumed more advanced content ignored it.

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makeitdouble 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now

We've had more publicly available educational content than ever with 40+ minutes videos finding their public. Podcasts have brought the quality of audio content to a new level, people pay to get additional content.

People are paying for publications like TheVerge, Medium and newsletter also became a viable business model. And they're not multitasking when watching YouTube or reading on their phone.

That's where I'd put the spotlight. And the key to all of it is, content length is often not dictated by ads (Sponsors pay by the unit, paid member don't get the ads) but by how long it needs to be.

If on the other hand we want to keep it bleak, I'd remind you that the before-the-web TV was mostly atrocious and aimed at people keeping it on while they do the dishes. The bulk of books sold where "Men come from Mars" airport books and movies were so formulaic I had a friends not pausing them when going to the bathroom without missing much.

Basically we accepted filler as a fact of life, and we're now asking the you generation while they're not bitting the bullet. And honestly, I can still read research papers but I completely lost tolerance for 400 pages book that could have been a blog post.

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jimbob45 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ve come to the same conclusion after years of feeling like the idiot for not being able to sit through books. If people aren’t making it through your book, they might have a short attention span but your book also might just be bloated, unclear, or uninteresting. It may even not have set expectations well enough. As Brandon Sanderson says, it’s very easy to skip out on the last half of Into The Woods if you don’t know who Stephen Sondheim is as a writer.

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stevenAthompson 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Early in life I learned the rule: If one person is a jerk, he's just a jerk. If you feel like everyone is a jerk, you are probably the one being a jerk.

The same is true of books. If you think one book is bad, it's probably the book. If you think all/most books are slow you should work on your attention span.

	▲	makeitdouble 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Shouldn't we take into account that the industry is also famous for being a monetization path for bloggers, pundits and grifters, for whom a book deal means jackpot; combined with a minimum word count pushing authors/ghost writers to pad their work to reach an average page volume ? I mostly read non-fiction, so the landscape is probably grimmer, but actual good books aren't that many, and I feel that has been a common wisdom for centuries. Except we're trying push that fact under the carpet as already fewer people are buying books.