
The Death, and Life, of Reading Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (2016) - Tomte
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2016/08/18/the-death-and-life-of-reading-have-been-greatly-exaggerated/
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asdfman123
The author seems to miss that there are people like me -- internet addicts who
don't read much anymore. I was born in the mid-80s and throughout most of my
youth the only options were really vapid TV like reruns of Friends, very
limited use internet, or books. For the most part, I chose books.

I would read _constantly_. Fiction, nonfiction, books on science, books on
history, books on literature, you name it. I read my older brother's honors
English books sitting around.

These days the internet is far more attractive and interesting than anything
else going on, and I can scratch my itch to read by skimming articles on news
aggregators without really retaining anything.

Articles about the "death of reading" are about people like me who have
trouble unplugging to read. There are still some people who do read books, so
it's not completely dead. But it is kind of sad for people like me who miss
reading.

(I'm actually doing much better these days, though, and at least right now I'm
getting some good reading done as I'm hooked on a series.)

~~~
dalbasal
That's a certain death too. I'm in the same boat. Reading a book has gone from
guilty pleasure to the " _I really need to do more reading "_ chore.

People still like Shakespeare. But, it's not a guilty pleasure anymore. Its
something you do to "better yourself." You might call it a bourgeoisie
pursuit.

A lot of art looks like this when it retires. It moves up the class ladder
where it is maintained for posterity.

------
j7ake
I don't understand why the number of books people read a year mean anything.

If someone read one book a year, but they were part of the "Art of Computer
Programming" (including some exercises), it would be much more impressive than
someone who read 50 books from Goosebumps series.

Reading is important, but contemplation and penetration of a subject should be
the goal (e.g. doing exercises in back of a book, summarizing a book,
critiquing a book). People who are trying to finish a book every week is
missing the point, and will never read anything that is difficult or dense.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I agree. In particular, I don't think reading _fiction_ is in any way better
than watching TV. Either way, you're doing it for entertainment, and getting
nothing more out of it. Not even shared cultural context, as these days the
shared culture is mostly TV-oriented.

~~~
bena
Even within fiction, there's wiggle room. Hell, I'd even say not all TV is
_just_ entertainment. There's a big difference between reading "Pachinko" and
"50 Shades Freed".

But yeah, I notice a lot of people like to brag about quantity of books read
and claim that makes them learned. It would be like going to McDonald's every
day and saying you have a refined palate.

~~~
stuxnet79
> not all TV is just entertainment

Certainly, not all television is entertainment but in my experience the whole
medium itself tends to get looked down upon and there's a lot of ridiculous
virtue-signaling involved.

Compared to the people I interact with I read a fair bit, I'd say higher than
average. However, I also watch the occasional documentary / tv show. In social
settings I usually don't bring up what I'm reading as I find it's not a
socially wise thing to do unless I'm certain the other party has similar
reading habits to mine. In general I usually bring up what I've watched
recently. What I find amusing are the subtle jabs I get for 'wasting my time
watching tv' from people who I'm sure don't read as much as I do.

To me television is just another medium, nothing more, nothing less. It has
its advantages and disadvantages, sure, but I've learned just as much if not
more from extremely well done lectures / documentaries as I have from books.
Even from watching regular 'tv shows' for entertainment purposes I've learned
quite a bit as a lot of shows these days are extremely detailed (e.g. Mr.
Robot) and there's quite a lot to learn or think about if you pay enough
attention.

I don't play video games as much these days, but I also find the amount of
disdain people hold for the entire medium is unwarranted IMHO.

For what I'm watching right now - I'm enjoying James Burke's Connections which
was recommended here on HN a while back. I highly recommend others to watch it
if they haven't!

~~~
bena
> not all television is entertainment

This made me chuckle. I was trying to imply that things can be more than
entertainment. Even things that are billed as straight up documentaries can
hold some entertainment value.

And I agree with you, people like to look down on television even though it's
just another medium. I've recently watched The Good Place, which is pretty
much a sitcom, but they do introduce you to various philosophical concepts.
Both directly and indirectly.

Penn Jillette said Mickey Dolenz has the best quote about video games he's
ever heard: Video games are the new rock and roll. It's the thing the parents
don't get. So Penn watches his kids play Minecraft and he doesn't get it, but
he _knows_ he doesn't get it so he just lets them discover their own world.

------
lazerpants
The author is incorrect, at least according to polls. It looks like the
majority of Americans read a book in 2015, with many of them reading more than
one.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/27-percent-
america...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/27-percent-american-
adults-didnt-read-single-book-last-year-180957029/)

~~~
ACow_Adonis
The median is apparently something like "4 or 5 books" a year.

A YEAR.

In a virtue-signalling survey that will illicit higher responses than we might
otherwise expect (self reported rates of untested things seen as "good" tend
to be over-report on such surveys, while rates of things seen as "bad" then to
be under-reported), i think that actually supports the authors point.

Especially when he/she mentions people with a stack of books on their bedstand
or whom pack their kindles with multiple books at a time for holidaying.

~~~
maneesh
I'm confused. Do you think 4 or 5 books a year is a lot, or a little?

~~~
ACow_Adonis
I think its appreciably close to nothing (including both the number of books
many people will be made to read while at compulsory schooling and education,
and I also think its close the kind of number of books a non-reader would
respond to such a survey when making up an number given that they really don't
read in any practical amount).

~~~
zith18
I think the real number is close to 0-1 books read a year for most people. 5-6
books read a year would be much more then the average person in my estimation.

------
tw1010
I mostly just wish more people would read so that it'd be more likely that the
5 people I hang out the most were avid readers, so I could get some spillover
wisdom.

------
throwawaymath
I think this article would be better if it abstracts "deep reading" to
longform content. The sort of reading the article is focusing on (novels,
fiction) is only a small subset of the total amount of "dense" content
available. The article calls itself a "frivolous" blog post, but many blogs
are very insightful and intellectually stimulating. If in any given year you
read zero books, but you read several articles from The Economist and Foreign
Affairs each week, you're still reading a substantial amount of longform
content.

Even in that (more generous) context, I think it's pretty difficult to say
anything meaningful about how much reading the average person does. The best
we can do is probably trade anecdotes because self-reported survey responses
could be unreliable. That being said, in my opinion a lot of people
(especially on websites such as this one) don't have a good awareness of how
many people are either inadvertently or _willfully_ uneducated because they
simply don't want to read. It's very difficult to replace the information
density of longform content when you're using a video medium, but videos are
clearly far more popular. Consider how often you search for reviews or
instructions and can find only videos on YouTube that say in 5 - 10 minutes
what could have been written in a few paragraphs and read in maybe 2 minutes.
Sometimes instead of videos it's weird infographics filled with gifs.

Note that I'm not talking about informational entertainment videos or visual
walkthroughs - I'm talking about strictly inefficient videos designed to be a
learning utility, like all those oddball ones where someone (poorly) narrates
how to do something on their compute by _recording themselves doing it and
typing instructions._ Likewise, if you read through the comment threads about
a new movie in /r/movies, you'll come away with far more actionable insights
about the film than if you watched any given video review about it online. The
videos that _do_ have a lot of information density are notable as exceptions
that prove the rule: they're generally very long, by YouTube standards, and
not (intentionally) funny. Consider 3Blue1Brown or AltShiftX, for example. The
antithesis of this is local news or quick video snippets taking the place of
longer articles in the NYT, WSJ or FT.

If you're reading this comment, you are probably a person who likes to read.
You might not read fiction much, but you're spending your time on a forum
specifically devoted to discussing thought provoking content. That means you
might be in a professional and personal bubble where all or most of the people
you talk to enjoy reading "interesting" things, for some definition of
interesting. But most people are not scientists, entrepreneurs or software
engineers debating the finer points of e.g. driving automation on Hacker News.
Many people (especially below the poverty line) simply don't have the time to
read anything nontrivial between taking care of their family and working one
or more jobs. Worse still, many people have become so used to video content
that they won't read anything. One friend of mine only keeps up with the news
by having CNN on in the background at his computer. When I sent him an article
about something I thought he'd find interesting (the article on here recently
about Riot's anti-cheating systems), he simply said he wouldn't read it - not
because he wasn't interested, but because, "meh, too long."

And this circles back to my original point - whether you consider only fiction
or any intellectually stimulating longform content, it's clear that the vast
amount of actionable information people consume is presented to them via a
medium that is not designed for clarity and density. If all you consider is
fiction you might miss this point, because entertainment-driven media can be
substantially thought provoking whether it's read or watches. But non-fiction
suffers dramatically when it leaves the written medium.

