Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Hot on the heels of last Fall’s depressing NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” (itself a follow-up to the equally depressing NEA report “Reading at Risk”), which showed that more and more Americans are giving up reading, there’s now a report that states that reading is heading downhill in Britain, too. According to the website This is London, “A quarter of Britons say they have not read a book in the past year and nearly half admit to lying about their reading to appear more intelligent.”

In order to try and reverse these trends, the government is now urging “bosses to set up libraries in former workplace smoking rooms to transform employees’ reading habits,” not to mention that “parents are also being urged to spend at least ten minutes a day reading with their children.” Added to this is the insane notion that “more time would be set aside in the primary school day for reading as part of a review of the curriculum” (which means the Wii elective just flew right out the window along with the controller).

I find it pretty depressing that the nation that gave us the peerless geniuses Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham now has to scramble to erect libraries the way earlier generations built bomb shelters. And yet, funnily enough, books still have some cachet. Because, as the British study found, people had lied about reading certain books “just so they could join in with the conversation.” Which begs the question, I wonder if anyone taking part in those “conversations” had read the book in question, or were they all faking it?

Some clues as to why this is happening can be found in the website’s comments section, where one guy says that “I think people would be better of trying to think of ways to improve the world rather than wasting their lives reading any sort of book,” while another chimes in with “It’s not that we don’t want to read. It’s simply this drivel they publish nowadays and try to pass it off as bestsellers. There’s nothing to read! No thanks. I’d much rather read a good article online.” And, of course, none of this is relegated just to Britain. These depressing trends are being seen in lots of countries (mine included). Print is disappearing from our schools, parents spend less time reading to their kids, and your average “man on the street” found his way there via Google Maps.