Last Sunday’s New York Times had an interesting feature on reading that I think you all should...well, read.

The basic question was: “online, are you really reading?” to which my initial response was, well, since I had read the article online, did I then actually read it at all? The article was framed around the fact that fewer and fewer teenagers (or younger kids) read books these days, and that thanks to online media, they avoid anything printed. This debate has been going on for decades—at least since the advent of television, and I would guess even since the advent of radio. For example, take this argument from the article:

[S]ome argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

Oh, come now; pick any non-book medium and the same argument has already been made. Wasn’t television supposed to have shortened attention spans? Or did it? What was I saying? Who are you and what do you want?

Anyway, my unscientific opinion is that every generation and every new media platform whittle away the market for books a little more.

To wit: The Times article cites a National Endowment of the Arts report:

According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

But I wonder: all these stories inevitably focus on young people. but how many adults even read books anymore? And I don’t mean business books; I mean books for pleasure? I googled it and came across a site called BookStatistics.com from Para Publishing which has links to a zillion things book-related. I’d spend more time on this site, but, well, I’d rather read a book.... Scrolling way down, I found that they cite a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts study that found that:

RECREATIONAL READING IS DOWN ACCORDING TO THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS. “We've got a public culture which is almost entirely commercial- and novelty-driven," says NEA chairman Dana Gioia.

Only 38% of adults in 2006 said they had spent time reading a book for pleasure the previous day.

65% of college freshmen in 2005 said they read little or nothing for pleasure.

30% of 13-year-olds in 2004 said they read for fun “almost everyday,” down from 35% in 1984.

Furthermore:

2004. 56.6% of adult Americans said they read at least one book, fiction or non-fiction, between August 2001 and August 2002 compared to 60.9% ten years prior.

The number of adults engaged in reading literature--defined as novels, short stories, plays and poetry, and a focus of the study--was 46.7% in 2002, down from 54% in 1992 and 56.9% in 1982.

 (Full disclosure: I prefer reading books to most other things and go through half a dozen books a month, depending on their length; a perfect Sunday afternoon for me is sitting on the couch with a good book; no TV, no computer, no mobile phone, just quiet. Well, except during football season...)

I think one of the issues involves the trend toward multitasking; that is, fewer and fewer people focus on a single medium at any given time. People are surfing the net, playing their iPods, perhaps while the TV is also on, chatting on cellphones, instant messaging, and, from what I've seen on the freeways, probably also driving at the same time. (The other day I saw a kid talking on his cellphone while skateboarding. Someone alert the Darwin Awards people.) Book reading—or even any kind of long, sustained reading—really doesn’t lend itself to multitasking. It requires a level of concentration that most other media do not. Ergo, it tends to get left out of the media mix.

As to the Times’ original question of whether “online reading” is actually reading...it always struck me that reading Internet content was not unlike the way I, and many people, read a magazine or newspaper. You pretty much scan for things that interest you, read the first few paragraphs of an article. This is why in journalism school they tell you to use an inverse pyramid structure whereby the most important information is at the top and things less and less vital as the story goes on; but then they teach a lot of things in journalism school that tend not to get practiced. But I digress....

But it turns out that when a lot of folks—like young people—are online, they do more than just passively look at content:

[O]thers say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

...

Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”

“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.

Well, you don't need to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics to be an astronaut, but you might want to at least know where the moon is. And it strikes me a little odd that someone who doesn't actually read books wants to write them.... be that as it may, an important part of the discussion is the way the younger generations approach the Internet. Like the raison d'être of Web 2.0, it's about interactivity and being active producers, not just passive consumers, of content. 

What it comes down to is that all media use is a matter of personal preference. Personally, I find video games and even most television to be a colossal bore, and even surfing the Internet gets tedious after about 15 minutes, but obviously that’s just me. I certainly wouldn't use my behavior to define future trends!

Here, though, is an interesting conundrum. If reading on the Internet is not real reading, what then does one make of this:

A couple of months ago, I went to downtown Saratoga in the evening, and as usual on Friday evenings, took the bus into town. Whenever I take the bus, I bring a book to read at the bus stop, during the ride, and while I am waiting for friends to show up wherever we happen to be meeting. However, the book I was reading at the time (Charles Dickens’ Bleak House*) is very thick, so I didn’t feel like schlepping it along. But while standing at the bus stop, I used my iPhone to find an online edition of Bleak House. I clicked the link to the chapter I had left off at in the print edition, and was thus able to continue reading seamlessly while I was out. When I got home that night, I moved my bookmark to the new spot.

Perhaps that’s the model for e-books; buying a print edition will get you a password to access the online edition (Dickens and other classics are in the public domain, which obviates DRM issues) that can be retrievable from a mobile device. Or, alternatively, only the online edition can be bought for a lesser price. Perhaps alternative downloadable formats can also be available. Some have suggested that the success of the Amazon Kindle (if it is indeed successful) is giving Apple some ideas...ah, would that that were the case, although portability would really be the only reason I would ever think of reading e-books—and portability using a device I already use for other things. That is, I was multitasking on the bus; I was also listening to the iPhone’s built in iPod, periodically checking e-mail, and dodging telemarketing calls.

All media exist in essentially in a market economy; the market will decide which forms endure and which do not. Those of us outside mainstream tastes have gotten used to that long ago, though we can still grumble about it.

*Last August, after visiting the Charles Dickens House Museum in London, I embarked on a mission to read all his novels. Almost a year later, I have only two more to go.