‘Tis the season to buy, buy, buy, so independent booksellers in America say they’re approaching the year-end holidays with “cautious optimism,” according to an informal survey conducted earlier this month by the American Booksellers Association.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like much to you, but consider the source. To an independent bookseller, “cautious optimism” is the equivalent of “unbridled euphoria” in anyone else. It’s a tough line of work, selling books – an endless rearguard action against the seemingly invincible forces of cultural decay. The problems for the independent bookseller are manifold, but we can boil them down to two.

The first is most familiar: the imperialistic encroachment of the great bookselling chains, with their massive marketing leverage and bottomless resources. For the small seller this is a serious problem, of course – but who knows? The consolidation of the book business over the last 15 years may soon be undone by forces we can’t foresee at the moment. The market works in mysterious ways, and someday the decentralized distribution of books represented by the small seller could flourish again.

The second great affliction of the book business, however, may be more enduring and much harder to reverse: the decline of reading itself.

As it happens, professional bookworms are eager to correct it. Through the National Endowment for the Arts this summer, they issued a manifest, a forlorn diagnosis with no cure attached. The NEA report, called “Reading at Risk,” could have more precisely been called “Reading of Good Books at Risk,” since it meant to draw attention to the decline of literary reading – as opposed to the consumption of the oeuvres of Drs. Phil and Laura that still engage significant segments of the public and probably always will.

While overall book sales in America have tripled over the last 25 years, the reading of “imaginative works” of fiction is a different matter, as the report made plain. The decline is illustrated in a series of highly unliterary tables and charts, bearing gloomy statistics culled from surveys beginning in 1982.

The surveys asked whether respondents have read any plays, poetry, novels, or short stories over the previous year. In 1982, 56.9% said they had; 20 years later the percentage dropped to 46.7. And the pace of the decline is accelerating.

Worse, from the bookworms’ point of view, the decline – which is seen in both men and women, across all age and ethnic groups, and among all income and education levels – is steepest in the 18-to-34 age group. Twenty years ago, young adults constituted the cohort most likely to read literature. Today, in the age of PlayStations and MP3s and the Internet, they are the least likely. “At the current rate of loss,” the report concluded, “literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century.”

Of course, American culture is home to many gloom-and-doomers, who are happiest when cluck-clucking over whatever particular hand basket the whole doomed culture is heading to hell in on any given day. Immediately after being issued, the report was condemned as just another howl from these professional pessimists.

Charles McGrath, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review – high-brow culture’s equivalent of the Holy See of Rome – criticized the report on methodological grounds, pointing out that surfing the Web, which the report implicitly dismisses as just another form of “electronic media,” often involves intensive reading.

Moreover, said Mr. McGrath and other critics, the report failed to make crucial distinctions. It excluded worthy nonfiction while describing anything fictional, from Danielle Steel to Marcel Proust, as “literary” and thus commendable.

The report’s critics scored some small, pedantic points. But in truth, they were just avoiding the report’s larger message. If Americans were neglecting the low-level fiction of Dean Koontz and flocking to the high-level nonfiction of Isaiah Berlin, for example, the report would be on shakier ground. But that’s not what’s happening. Indeed, despite increased sales, total book reading in America is declining, too. So what do we lose when we lose a culture of reading? Here’s how NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, himself a well-regarded poet and essayist, put it in the report:

“Print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insight possible. To lose such intellectual capability – and the many sorts of human continuity it allows – would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment.”

The report’s authors were much better at diagnosing the disease than at suggesting a cure – a common shortcoming in us doom-and-gloomers. After issuing a pious call for all relevant parties “to take stock of the sliding literary condition of our country,” they fell silent. Which leaves this as a task for everyone to take upon themselves, rebuilding the reading culture reader by reader. Fortunately, this season is the best time to start, by filling our gift-giving lists with good books and justifying all those poor, beleaguered booksellers in their “cautious optimism.” At least for now.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.