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Once you see it, you cannot unsee its effect on the books themselves. Fiction is increasingly shaped to be shared rather than merely absorbed. The novel that wrecks you, the twist worth filming your reaction to, the aesthetic worth belonging to, all of it is built for conversation, for the group chat and the comment thread. Something real is lost in the shift. The private, unhurried, unwatched encounter with a book, the kind that rearranges you precisely because no one else is in the room, is exactly the sort of reading those decline statistics are measuring as it quietly disappears. We are trading the interior for the communal, and pretending not to notice.