I think the content of many books is much cooler than the crap on my timelines. There’s just higher entropy (or activation energy?) to get the book picked up and opened vs the serotonin lever in our pockets.

I’ve just strived to read like hell to my kids and make reading one of their most fun things around. Pretty much all we read is stuff they like, even if I hate it (I’m looking at you, Pokemon novels). If they like an author (in our house we love Daniel Pinkwater) I will go out of my way to find that authors books. We write to authors, we talk about what we read (somehow I serialised a retelling of Killing Commendatore), my 8 yo listens to my audiobooks in the car with me, we are frickin bookworms.

And of course they still play Minecraft and animal crossing. It’s just that picking up a book is one of their default go-tos, and I think that’s enough. They’re building the habit and the understanding of what reading is about, and if we keep that up they will be ok.

We can’t, it’s simply too addictive in comparison. It produces more dopamine, more quickly and consistently and there’s no way books will ever compete. Really it’s not even technology that is the problem, it’s specifically just algorithmic driven social media. We have to actively avoid the addictive algorithms and it’s really difficult.