When the National Endowment for the Arts released its "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America" this past summer, marshaling statistics gathered over a 10-year period, the report confirmed what many educators, librarians, and booksellers have long suspected: that our energies are increasingly focused elsewhere, and that the shift away from the printed page is happening at an alarming rate. Since 1982, the percentage of the U.S. population reading literature has dropped more than 10 percent, from 56.9 to 46.7 percent; literary reading by educational category has dropped sharply at every level; and, most distressingly, between 1982 and 2002 literary reading among young adults has fallen 17 percent in the 18-24 age group. As always, the numbers can be questioned, footnoted, finagled, and otherwise belabored, but what's the point? We all know the basic truth. Habits are changing; books and what we might call "book culture" matter less than they once did to more people. The three big questions--easy to put, hard to answer--are: What has happened, what does this portend, and what, if anything, can be done? In this article the author explores these questions, and discusses possible reasons, and solutions.