https://www.historytoday.com/archive/media’s-first-moral-pan...
https://didyouknowfacts.com/facts/as-novels-became-more-prom...
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Novel-Reading-Pani...
Some went so far as to ban reading for certain groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_per...
Once one has read whatever articles they were interested in for that day, that's it. No refreshing multiple times per day, no reading long comment threads, no frustration about said comment threads ("how can people be so wrong on the internet, must reply"), no live updates on stories, and more time to think instead of mindlessly consuming more information that's of lower quality.
The New Yorker has long form articles that take longer to read than the typical daily newspaper article, sure, but I'm not sure how that makes it non finite or more engaging than daily newspapers.
They don't throw them out because they really intend to finish them one day.
This topic comes up a lot and I am always astounded at how people so candidly compare screens to books. Many people I meet in my day to day life do not have the concentration required to read a novel. Maybe its time to put my glowing rectangle down.
Even before screens, some people talked on the phone compulsively, some played chess compulsively, some sat in their basement building things out of legos compulsively. Now it's possible to do all those things via a single screen. When looked at in this way, a screen is basically just a tool that takes on the form of many different physical objects rather than something nefarious.
Or, if they weren't reading, they'd flip on the TV and watch whatever was on for four hours, then brush their teeth, then Johnny Carson in bed. It's not like the average American was spending their evening sculpting before the internet.