What Happened to Book Reading
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Subject: [PD 5038] Fwd: What happened to book reading?
From: Marian Thacher
Date: Wed Aug 4 12:36:27 EDT 2010
gdemetrion at msn.com on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 at 8:41 AM -0700 wrote:
- Question: To what extent has serious book reading diminished given the pervasive nature of the new media? Moreover, is there an equivalency there or is there less an inclination against sustained consecutive thought in which one makes or ponders a complex argument that if reasonably mastered or grasped does have its own many rewards? Without being dogmatic here, I do wonder.
Good question, George. I've wondered this, as my reading habits have
substantially changed over the last few years. But consider that the
Kindle and other e-readers have become immensely popular, and Amazon sells
more Kindle books than hardbacks, meaning that people are still reading
books, but just carrying them a different way. Some of my colleagues are
reading books on their phones now that screens are getting a bit bigger.
So I consider that just as DVDs did not replace the movie theater, the
online world will not replace books and deep reading, because we still
need it. We will have different ways of sifting through our reading
choices, though. I have many more ways of finding things I want to read
than I used to - twitter sends me to links to books, facebook friends
recommend them, reading sites like GoodReads, Shelfari and others share
what my friends are reading. I had the experience recently of finding out
that a distant friend of mine had discovered an author she loved by seeing
what I was reading on LinkedIn. I would have never known this, though, if
it hadn't come up in conversation.
We are in a period of experimenting with the reading process. Does it have
to be visual? Audiobooks and podcasts have come a long way. I still
haven't given up my drawer full of cassette tapes, but I guess I will one
of these days. We no longer have to have reading skills to acquire meaning
from text, but can you have the same experience of intellectual inquiry
from listening that you do from reading? I'm still wondering about this,
but would say no at this point, just because it's harder to go back, make
notes, reread, lose and find your place, in audio.
Well, as you said, now back to my "real work."
Marian
