Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Last week I blogged on the recent survey about the decline of readership in America, a study that revealed one in four Americans didn’t read a book in the past year. What I found interesting was that some commentators tried to turn this depressing statistic on its head, saying that it meant that at least three out of four people did read a book. I understand the attempt to have an “accentuate the positive” mindset, but the fact that a quarter of our population didn’t even attempt to read a book in the last twelve months is indeed cause for major alarm.

A company who seems to be trying to reverse these trends is the cable channel BET, who recently produced — according to the LA Times — an “edgy video campaign promoting literacy and black pride.” The video is entitled “Read a Book,” and looks to me to be a cross between a Schoolhouse Rock segment and a 50 Cent video. The result is profane, catchy, and pretty humorous (and, I must add, not safe for work).

The video has incited a storm of protest, with some commentators on the BET website (as well as on Youtube, which is where I found the clip) either shocked by the video’s content or else amused by its satire. Greg Braxton, writing about the video last week in the LA Times in an article entitled “BET brouhaha,” writes that “Denys Cowan, senior vice president of animation for BET, said in an interview Thursday that he was ‘a little surprised’ that ‘Read a Book’ has elicited such a strong reaction. ‘We were doing it from the point of this being a fun, profound song,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know it would take on this life.’”

Whether or not the “Read a Book” video ever gets anyone to actually do so will remain to be seen, and whether or not the entire enterprise is in good taste is of course in the eye of the beholder, but at its very core this is yet another admission that large swaths of the American population are increasingly turning away from books and reading.