There was a time when people said, "Books are man's best friends." It was not merely a quotation — for an entire generation, it was a way of life. A book could accompany you on a train journey, sit beside your school bag, remain on your bedside table at night, or quietly occupy a corner of your home for years. For those who grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, and even into the early 2000s, reading was not something that had to compete with a smartphone. There were no endless notifications, no reels, no "watch next" — no algorithm continuously deciding what should capture our attention. There was simply a book. And we had time for it.

When a Library Card Meant Something

Ask someone who grew up before smartphones about their school or college library, and many will remember the same little object: the library card. You entered the library, searched the shelves, selected a book, and got it issued in your name. You took it home, read it, and returned it within the prescribed period — perhaps a week or two later. Sometimes the book was finished in two days; sometimes it took longer; sometimes you did not even like it. But the experience of choosing it was part of growing up.

Libraries were important institutions in schools and colleges. Public and private libraries served students, professionals, children, homemakers, and senior citizens alike, and many families maintained their own small libraries at home. Books occupied physical space — they were visible. A bookshelf told you something about the people who lived in a house. A child could pick up a book simply because its cover looked interesting. There was no algorithm. The shelf itself was the algorithm.

Daryaganj: A Paradise for Book Lovers

For generations of Delhi's readers, few places represented this culture better than Daryaganj. The Daryaganj Sunday book market became famous as a place where readers could search through enormous quantities of used, cheap, and sometimes rare books. Academic research describes it as a significant parallel book market whose history stretches back roughly half a century, and the British Library has documented its history — including its relocation to a more formal space at Mahila Haat in 2019.

For book lovers, Daryaganj was never simply a market — it was an adventure. Books were stacked on tables, spread across the ground, arranged in ways that encouraged exploration. A reader could spend hours searching through piles, never quite knowing what they were going to find, and that was the excitement. Even today, readers continue to visit — recent reader experiences describe crowded Sundays and extensive choices of second-hand books, showing that the appetite for physical books has certainly not disappeared.

India and the Reading Culture: What the Numbers Showed

There is an often-repeated statistic about India that captures something fascinating about the pre-social-media era. A 2005 NOP World Culture Score Index survey covering around 30 countries reported that Indians spent an average of 10.7 hours per week reading — the highest figure among the countries surveyed — with China following at around eight hours per week. An important qualification: the survey measured reading of books, newspapers, and magazines together, so it would be inaccurate to say Indians read books alone for 10.7 hours a week. Still, the finding is a useful snapshot of a period before Facebook, the iPhone, Instagram, or short-form video existed at any real scale.

Then the Mobile Phone Changed Everything

The mobile phone did not destroy reading overnight — its transformation happened gradually. First came calling, then SMS, then cameras, then affordable internet, then social networking, then smartphones, then video platforms, then short-form video. Suddenly, one device could perform the functions of a television, newspaper, camera, radio, bookstore, shopping centre, classroom, and entertainment system. The smartphone became the most powerful attention device ever placed in the hands of ordinary people.

India's digital transformation has been extraordinary. DataReportal estimated 806 million internet users in India in January 2025 — 55.3% of the population. By September 2025, Reuters reported nearly 1.02 billion internet users and around 750 million smartphones, making India the world's second-largest smartphone market, alongside an estimated 500 million unique social-media users.

The Smartphone Has Not Killed the Book

But here is where the story becomes more interesting. If smartphones and social media had completely destroyed our love for books, why do book fairs continue to attract enormous crowds? The answer is simple: people still love books. Some of India's largest book fairs continue to demonstrate remarkable public interest — and the International Kolkata Book Fair is one of the strongest examples.

The 49th edition, held in 2026, attracted approximately 32 lakh visitors and generated around ₹26.4 crore in book sales, according to reports. Visitor numbers were about 19% higher than the previous year's roughly 27 lakh, while sales increased by around 15%. The final Sunday alone reportedly attracted more than 4.3 lakh visitors. Thirty-two lakh people — not impressions, not online views — walked into a book fair to look at books, buy them, browse, meet authors, and spend time among them.

Book Fairs Across India: A State-by-State Snapshot

Kolkata's numbers are striking, but they are not an isolated case. Every winter, several Indian states host their own large book fairs, and the footfall data tells the same story in city after city — physical books still pull in enormous crowds, even in the age of the smartphone.

The Most Interesting Development: Books and Digital Payments

Even the traditional book fair is adapting to the digital age. At the 2026 Kolkata Book Fair, reports indicated that around 70% of purchases were made through UPI — an extraordinary symbol of change. The product is traditional; the payment method is modern. A reader may discover the book through social media, travel to the fair using a smartphone, find the stall through a digital map, and pay for the book using UPI. The book has not disappeared. The ecosystem around the book has changed.

What About the Rest of the World?

The question of which country has the world's largest number of readers is surprisingly difficult to answer. There is no single universally accepted global ranking that measures "reading" the same way across countries every year — some surveys count books completed, others count time spent, some fold in newspapers and magazines. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 75% of U.S. adults had read at least part of a book in the previous 12 months: 64% had read a print book, 31% an e-book, and 26% had listened to an audiobook. Interestingly, the overall share of Americans reading a book in the previous year has stayed fairly stable since Pew began tracking the question in 2011, even as formats have shifted.

What Did Books Give Us?

Books did more than provide information — they developed habits of thinking. A child who reads regularly encounters words that may never appear in everyday conversation. A teenager reading fiction learns to follow characters, understand emotions, and imagine experiences outside their own lives. A social-media feed can give us a hundred pieces of information in an hour; a book can give us a deep understanding of one subject. We need both speed and depth — but we should not confuse the two.

One should also be careful not to make exaggerated claims such as "books automatically increase intelligence" or "reels destroy memory." Human learning is far more complicated than that. But sustained reading clearly offers practice in skills that short-form content does not always demand to the same extent — following arguments, remembering context, interpreting language, making connections, and concentrating for extended periods.

Perhaps We Need a New Reading Habit

We do not necessarily need to return to the 1990s — we need to create a reading culture suitable for 2026. Schools can give students dedicated reading periods. Colleges can revive reading clubs. Libraries can become social spaces rather than silent rooms visited only before examinations. Parents can encourage children to maintain a personal bookshelf. And individuals can follow one simple rule: read before you scroll. It does not have to be two hours — twenty minutes of uninterrupted reading every day becomes more than 120 hours in a year, enough time to read several meaningful books.

• Give students a dedicated daily reading period
• Revive college and campus reading clubs
• Turn libraries into social, welcoming spaces
• Keep a personal bookshelf at home
• Follow one rule: read before you scroll

The Final Page

For generations, we called books our best friends. Maybe we were right. They did not judge us, they did not demand anything from us, and they were available whenever we needed them. Today, our phones have become our companions too — they connect us with the world and provide knowledge, entertainment, and communication. But perhaps we have given them too much of our time. The answer is not to throw away the smartphone. It is to make space beside it for something older, something quieter, something that has survived centuries of technological change. A book.

The next time you have twenty minutes free, don't automatically open a reel. Open a book. The next time you visit a bookstore, don't just browse — buy one. The next time you see a library, walk inside. The reading culture is not dead. It is waiting for us to rediscover it.

(The author is a postgraduate student of English literature at Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, Pitampura, Delhi.)