America's Decline in Literary Reading: Grappling with Technology's ...

44
Internet bookselling has given me, and countless others
in the same situation, access to virtually every
book in print. Further, Amazon seems to lead me to
great books with every visit and has sparked interest
in new books that are now favorites. The fact
remains, however, that the literary reading has
declined across all segments of the American population
despite the increased accessibility the electronic
bookstore provides.
So what can be done about this? Can literary
reading itself somehow become integrated into modern
technology, and if so would it result in more
people reading? E-books, as they are called, are electronic
books that can be downloaded to computers
and read on a screen. Portable devices, called Ebook
readers, come in a small ergonomic package
about the size of a book and allow the user to download
e-books and read them on an LCD screen. This
allows for quick access to a multitude of e-books
through online book sellers, and hundreds of these
books can be stored on a single device. Pages are
turned by the press of a button, and different features
allow for larger font, different page orientation,
and a number of other aesthetic settings.
Despite these conveniences, however, e-books have
experienced little success. Perhaps their poor reception
can best be explained by looking at Sven
Birkerts’ essay “States of Reading,” which describes
how a reader can be “teased” by the material aesthetics
of reading a novel:
You turn the book over in your hands, you scan
the sentences on the back of the jacket....Of
course, this circling of the book, too, this reading
around it before reading inside it, is part of the
pleasure in a new book....Calvino guides his
chapter to conclusion, the conclusion being, in
effect, the reader’s excited haste to turn the page
to begin. (101)
Many, myself included, find pleasure in the physical
form of the book. Examining the cover, skimming
the back, and turning the pages of a good book somehow
add to the experience of reading. Digital forms
of reading simply do not offer this experience and
hence have not become popular among readers.
Reading words on an LCD screen and pressing buttons
to turn virtual “pages” simply do not compare to
the material, aesthetic experience of reading an actual
book. Maybe this is because digital forms of literature
seem to have less “substance.” We don’t conceive of
them as material objects—physical manifestations of
ink on paper—but as mere digital representations of
words—light projected on screens. For many of us,
words must be printed and therefore available to the
senses to seem weighty or even “real.” Perhaps it’s
important for us to feel the smoothness of the page, to
hear the slight crackle of its turning, to in some cases
smell the mustiness of the paper or the faint scent of
ink. An actual book seems like something you can
digest, the heft of the pages subconsciously feeling
like something substantive to feed to your mind, the
materiality of paper facilitating the very notion of
reading as consumption.
The very idea of reading is modified somewhat by
these new technologies. Are different forms of reading,
in particular reading from paper as compared to
reading from an electronic device, important? Does
the reading that literary scholars refer to only include
reading paper books, or would they be happy if people
read light produced by a screen rather than light
reflecting off of paper? Personally, I think that different
forms of reading don’t actually make a substantial
difference and that some day electronic language will
seem normative and natural to us. Indeed, our old
notions of reading may become so fully rooted in a
new technological context that books as we know
them could become obsolete. This will not necessarily
represent a shift in the literary culture but only a shift
in the medium of reading, a movement from paper to
the screen. I think that for many traditional readers
such as Sven Birkerts, reading is automatically
assumed to be something that is best accomplished
with ink and paper. Reading at Risk only counted
reading from printed books, which shows that the
NEA too put emphasis on the physical form.
It is easy to see why many readers dislike technology,
since they usually believe it to be responsible for
the decline in literary reading. Michael Dirda even
regards the web as largely an “invention of the devil”
(1). This is the attitude shared, at least to some
extent, by many writers, especially those who are
accustomed to old ways and are not familiar with
technology. A shift towards technology, however, is
inevitable. The internet has resulted in a wealth of
information, and offers the possibility of a new form
of electronic reading that could vastly increase the
distribution of literature. Still, reading on a screen for
most people in our time will never replace reading
from paper. Times change and often long set cultural
practices such as reading face natural resistance to
the rapid advancement of technology. It is interesting
to think about the shift from the spoken word to the
written word, and from the written word to the
printed word, as well as the roadblocks that surely
accompanied those changes. When the printing press
was invented, how many longed for the aesthetic
value of the hand written manuscript and complained
that the printed word, a reflection of the
newest technology of the times, simply wasn’t the
same. It is natural for people to resist change, but it is
equally natural for people to eventually adjust to
change and come to accept it. It’s not hard to imagine
an essay 50 years from now, in which the Sven
Birkerts of my generation talks about the aesthetic
values of some future form of reading. Perhaps such