This is silly. There are so many readers, that you can pick most any topic and format and this is a true statement. Nor is it a refutation that we have shorte

This is silly. There are so many readers, that you can pick most any topic and format and this is a true statement. Nor is it a refutation that we have shorter attention spans. It /could/ be, but there could be a lot of things there. It is a hard question that will take some nuanced investigation to really get a good answer. To this particular claim, though, it is always been the case that a large number of people buying literature are doing so for the signalling use case. Authors shouldn't confuse purchases with reads.