This is not an essay for anyone other than those interested in the study of literature as an art form and as a literary historian.
I found it amusing in part because I simply do not personally buy the nomenclature of people being "bad readers." I would rather talk about serious or engaged readers compared to light or non-engaged readers.
My take is we should not worry about the latter as much as attempt to positively cultivate the former. We should recognize very few people are going to be serious or engaged readers, just as there are only a certain amount of really good car mechanics. It is about a form of elitism, that is meaning neither arrogant nor wealthy, but elite or elitist in the sense of someone who really is almost obsessed, and often obsessed, with something and wants to be really, really good at it. Magic Johnson is an elitist in basketball. My former neighbor who was a lead mechanic for a local Honda dealer is an elitist in auto repair and refurbishing. Each cares deeply about honing the craft, honing what is best and understanding how others perform the work each cares deeply about.
Reading is itself a vocation, and encompasses comprehension and articulation of what one is reading or has read. Nabokov, in the article, appears too despairing, and the backstory about not getting the Voice of America gig, shows a side of him that is petty. I won't say I was ever a fan of any of his stories, not even the one he is most renowned. But there are novelists whose novels I do not read, but whose essays or prose I admire, e.g. Joyce Carol Oates, whose essays I often adore; John Updike, whose frame of reference is small minded in my view, but whose prose is powerful and taut.
