Strong Words About Reading

I love this woman. In response to a recent N.E.A. report on the demise of reading, Ursula K. Le Guin offers a few choice words on the so-called reading crisis and its relationship to corporation-owned publishing companies. In an essay titled “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading” (Harper's Magazine, February 2008), Le Guin has nothing but scorn for publishing executives who “think they can sell books as commodities” and are disappointed if their holdings don't increase “yearly, daily, hourly.” Until the corporate takeover of independent publishing houses, she points out, publishers didn't expect expansion: “They were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, flatly.”

“One of the most despicable things about corporate publishing and chain booksellers,” Le Guin states, “is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn't 'perform' within a few weeks, it gets its cover torn off – it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate.”

She goes on to lament the damage corporate publishers are doing by focusing on formulaic best-sellers. She contrasts reading with electronic entertainment:

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 into 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.

I agree completely with Le Guin. Readers have always been in the minority, not majority, and books have endured and will continue to do so despite all the electronic competition or the machinations of corporation-owned publishing companies.

Analog to Digital

The first rule in the primer on technology states that we always overestimate the short-term impact of new technology while underestimating its longer-term effect. People in Gutenberg's era were astounded when they realized that books, originally the province of kings and the wealthy, could be had by those with more modest incomes. What they didn't see coming, though, was the cultural transformation enabled by the simple act of reading. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan argues that the printed book changed our consciousness, affecting the way we absorb ideas and information. Western Rationalism might not have taken hold, he states, without the printing press and its orderly presentation of text.

So what happens now as multifaceted mashups like Omnisio, Microsoft's Popfly, and Yahoo Pipes, present more and more information on the Internet using visual media that relegates the written word to a medium layered over the top? Will embedded video, infographic boxes, and all the other eye candy competing for attention affect the way we read? What about the way we think? A report published last week by the British Library and researchers at University College London described “a new form of information-seeking behavior” characterized as being “horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature.” Information-seekers today do not read in a linear, sequential fashion online; they “are promiscuous, diverse, and volatile.” In other words, people are not reading in the way we traditionally understand it.

The printing press conditioned us to reason and solve problems in a linear way. Considering that much of the information we gather on the web is visual and aural rather than written, it seems likely that people may begin to use a different form of logical framework to process information. The web might be transforming our processes of thinking and knowledge-gathering in a more dramatic way that even the Gutenberg bible did.