It’s worth recalling that mass literacy is only about 300 years old, so the modern culture of reading is about as recent as the United States, which is probably itself a consequence of mass literacy. Ironically, today it’s also probably leading the decline in mass literacy. Maybe book-reading will eventually become an anachronistic hobby, although even Thomas Jefferson made this prophecy too [1].

“Acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.” [2]

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...

2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03205520

There's been a lot of debate over the years about what exactly it was that Ambrose was doing differently, and whether silent reading was really so uncommon in antiquity.

the Augustine passage is a fascinating piece of evidence, but i wonder how much we can infer from it about the wider reading habits of the ancient world.