The Decline of Reading

One of the great perks of my job is being surrounded by people who are insatiable readers and gatherers/collectors of information and knowledge. I am one of those people (as much as my brain allows after 40+ hours a week staring at books). I believe the term for us is "nerds." :) And we rock.

Because when you put a bunch of nerds together, they come up with great finds like this article. I laughed, I sighed, I agreed. If you can hold on to read the whole thing, you'll notice a mention of "backlists" on the last page. That's where I work—in Backlist Development. (More to come on that soon... I've been meaning to blog about it for a while, but thought it might be too boring. But so many people ask about it, I might as well put something in writing.)

My favorite part:

"Besides, readers aren't viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained. Once you've pressed the ON button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not 'interactive' with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it . . ."