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Girls' reading has dropped off dramatically, too; boys just had a shorter distance to fall. I know "F@#$g girlbosses" are the preferred explanation for many ills hereabouts, but for anyone who's hung out with elementary schoolers recently, it's so obviously the screens in this case that I don't think Ockham's razor supports any more elaborate explanation.
Citation needed, so here's a 2025 study that captures some of the key gender differences: in kids 0-8, 59% of girls read or were read to daily vs. 50% of boys, but for both populations the figure is falling steadily over time.
By contrast, parental reports of screen use showed boys spent 25% more daily time on screens than girls. They spent 50% more time gaming (especially console gaming), as well as substantially more time watching online videos.
Table 10 in that study gives useful insights into what would appeal to boys. It shows that boys and girls have similar YouTube viewing patterns, except for the categories of streaming videogame commentary and prank videos, both of which little boys spend far more daily time consuming. This is by parental report, so likely a large underestimate given how often kids (and boys especially!) sneak YouTube time on phones or school computers without their parents' knowledge.
Have you ever seen any of those brainrot prank videos that little boys gravitate toward, on channels like Brent Rivera's? I was subjected to some secondhand, recently, as I glanced over the shoulder of a ~9-year-old little boy who binge-watched for three straight hours on his ipad while his dad was emailing. (This was in travel circumstances where once kids might have turned to a book.) The videos are aggressively, mind-numbingly high-intensity, emotive and anti-thought. Jump cuts multiple times per second! Bright colors and Punch-and-Judy-level plots! Constant threat and edgy cruelty, telegraphed by actors who grimaced and mugged cartoonishly through their roles, with constant fantasy slapstick to confuse and perplex. Bonus vague undercurrents of disturbing sexuality (Brent apparently feels up his sister a bunch) to seamlessly transition the kids to phone porn when they hit 10 or 11.
I felt trippy and mentally fried after about 5 minutes of that stuff. I can't imagine what it would do to a young person's brain to spend hours per day at that level of passive stimulation during sensitive developmental windows from toddlerhood onward. Verbal ability also builds on itself, so kids who read just a bit less will fall farther behind in reading comprehension and stamina with each passing year.
If you honestly think it's those publishing Karens' fault that this boy didn't read, I'd be curious to hear exactly what print stories you think would compare favorably in attention-grabbing qualities to Brent Rivera or Five Nights at Freddy's. I suspect the Karens would love to know, as well.
Hard to say, but behavior by the "Karens" in other fictional media industries such as film, TV, and video games suggests that these Karens would prefer not to find out, even if it means paying a hefty financial penalty.
I'd say that a good start might be trying to appeal to boys by figuring out what appeals to them in literature by e.g. looking where there is a higher proportion of boys reading, such as, e.g. comic books (the actually successful ones from yesteryear) or visual novels or even light novels, and see what those have in common. I think one core part that would likely help is to make sure that the fiction specifically flouts ideals, concepts, principles, and such, of whatever name we're putting on the cluster of ideologies around feminism today. A lot of the male-successful VNs and LNs seem to have a significant wish-fulfillment portion, which, to young men, would certainly require things that would make the typical standard-issue liberal feminist at least cringe, if not faint; as such, a publisher aiming to appeal to young male readers ought to at least consider, if not prioritize, making literature that specifically offends their editors.
I also suspect that nerdy scifi or tech-oriented military thrillers like the stuff by Crichton and Clancy of yesteryear could find a decent male audience, though, like all literature, it's likely far less popular in 2026 than 1996. And it seems vanishingly unlikely that someone who's not a male autist or autist-adjacent could or would want to write a good book like that; as such, if the publishers made sure not to discriminate against males and possibly even sought out autists or autist-adjacents, with bonus points if their writings seemed to condone ideologies that would make their median editor ragequit and call for a boycott of the publisher, then that might also be a good step.
Yes, as I said, I'm aware that's the one-size-fits-all prescription hereabouts. Similarly, I bet the tankies think flouting capitalism would solve the reading crisis and the NIMBYs think stricter zoning couldn't hurt. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But the claim that little Jaden with the slack jaw and glazed eyes would totally click away from his sixtieth Dhar Mann video and dive into thick books if only the mean editor ladies... what, put more vapid big-titty schoolgirls in there? I think you're going to need a proposed mechanism for that. The internet is already chockablock with vapid big-titty schoolgirls, many of whom you can apparently watch getting excitingly choked and butt-fucked while their big titties bounce around in crystal-clear high-def. What's the competing attraction of a paragraph of tepid prose description that forces you to exhaustingly imagine the titties yourself based on a lot of words whose meanings you don't know?
As you pointed out, there's lots of media out there that's already consumed enthusiastically by boys and men. Versus traditional prose novels, all of those other media genres are notable for dispensing much higher levels of stimulation while making much lighter demands on abstract thinking, verbal reasoning, long-term focus and complex emotional processing. If a group, left to itself, preferentially consumes media that's mostly pictures with few words, media that features fast-moving objects, physical conflicts, bright colors and flashing lights, media with cartoonish characters based on familiar TV/film/game IP and predictable wish-fulfillment plots, media with exaggerated visual depictions of receptive sexual targets, then that's what I'd call an extremely obvious revealed preference for not prose literary fiction. Which is fine, but again, what's your model for "just mix in a little cartoony comic-book fanservice porn and maybe they'll rush back to novels"? Why would they be likelier to take the medicine with a spoonful of sugar, when they can already just eat the sugar straight?
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