An article in the Weekend Australian by Stephen Matchett titled Turning the final pages spells out alarm bells for those who teach literacy and those who love reading. Matchett is commenting on a report called To Read or Not to Read in late 2007 by the US National Endowment for the Arts which showed that the percentage of US adults who read books for entertainment or edification is declining in all age groups except the elderly.
The report showed the following
- Americans are reading less
- Americans are reading less well
- the declines in reading have civic, social, and economic implications
Matchett’s point is that there is no reason to believe that in Australia, the skill of reading won’t decline in the same way, although currently we don’t have any statistics to support such conclusions.
In North America the decline in reading seems to be having effect in
- the closure of book shops, even those that have been around for decades
- a decline in book sales in the general population
- book shops requiring that publishers pay for their books to be stocked on their shelves
- Increased costs in production of books, to the point where some publishers are espousing “printing on demand”
- funding for libraries dwindles to the point where they close.
- collapse of newspapers
At the same time the decline in reading of books for pleasure is being accompanied by a digital revolution which requires and promotes a different sort of literacy. Books are struggling to compete in the mass entertainment market.
Matchett believes the decline of reading for pleasure will have catastrophic effects on cultural and values education. In reading for pleasure we cultivate and practice skills that are then used in other sorts of reading.
Unless something unexpected occurs, it seems that we are on the verge of a world where a life shaped by reading is as foreign as it was before universal education and industrial scale printing made readers of the masses. But this time it will be because people have ample access to, but no use for, books.
For anybody who loves literature, who believes that reading widely, with no thought of practical benefit, educates an individual far more broadly than training in any discipline, this is a scarystory.
Definitely an article worth reading.
See a similar article in the New Yorker called Twilight of Books: What will life be like if people stop reading?
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That report is unjustifiably alarmist.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/07/internet.literacy or http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/are-americans-really-reading-less-303/?mod=WSJBlog for some alternate view.
For example:
in 1992, 43% of Americans read at an intermediate level; by 2003 the number was slightly higher at 44%. “Proficient” readers dropped slightly, from 15% to 13%. In other words, the distribution is basically unchanged - despite the vast influx of non-native English speakers into the US population during this period.
All of which raises an interesting question: if people are reading less, why haven’t scores dropped more dramatically? The answer gets to the most significant sleight of hand of the NEA study: its studies are heavily biased towards words on a printed page.
Odds are that you are reading these words on a computer monitor. Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink? According to the NEA you’re not, because in almost every study it cites, screen-based reading is excluded from the data. This is a preposterous omission, because of course the single most dramatic change in media habits over the past decade is the huge spike in internet activity.
Newspapers are collapsing because of the rise of internet advertising which is stripping revenue from them, not because people have stopped reading them.
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[…] It amazes me that so many articles are written about how book reading is on the decline, that women read more books than men and why and that final nail on the coffin: men don’t read fiction. I’m fascinated because this approach to the problem is exactly why publishing is floundering. The focus is all wrong. The emphasis is on trying to salvage what is widely believed to be the only hope for book buying: catering to women. Why would publishers limit themselves so when the smart thing to do would be to figure out how to use this information to expand their customer base? If your business model requires you to accept and adapt to problems rather than discover how to make those challenges work for you, it’s a flawed system that will leave you naked and vulnerable to the innovators. This is not good. […]
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