Why is reading so important? What role does reading play? We all consume information digitally.

Now, why do we need to go back to reading stuff? There's a few reasons. And it's not, again,

not a snooty thing at all. So you're absolutely right. The reading is massive, reading books

is massively declined. 57% of Americans now never read a book in any given year. It's the first

time in the history of the American Republic. That's the case where we're still a bit better than

that in Britain, but not by much. And there's several people who really help me to understand this

and what that's doing to us. That's partly a symptom of our declining attention and partly a

cause of it. And I took a bit about how. So, it's been a woman called Professor Anne Mangon,

is it's DaVanga University in Norway, who's a professor of literacy and probably the leading

expert in the world on these questions. She explained lots of things, but there's one very simple one.

You can do studies have been loads of studies shown this now. So you get group people, you split

them randomly into two. The first group, let's say you could do it with my book. You give one group

of people my book on the iPad, like your iPad there. And the other group, you give the physical book.

Right? And then you go back to them a week a month, a year later, and you just ask them questions

about the book. And it turns out invariably, the people who've read it on the screen remember

significantly less and understand significantly less of what they read. This is a very well-proven

effect. It's called screen inferiority. It's such a big effect. If you take a 10-year-old child,

it's the equivalent of two thirds of their progress in reading in a year is lost when they're reading

on a screen. That's how much it diminishes our ability to think. And it seems to be there's

lots of there's a big debate about why. But when you read, let's say, you know, we opened

the BBC News site now and you read the same story. When we read on a screen, what we tend to do

is read in a sort of skimming, z-packen. You sort of skimming keywords, right? When you read a book,

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