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.