EXTRA! EXTRA! Books Are Dead!

The Late, Lamented Book?

By Ted Pease
© 2007

(This column appeared in the Eureka (Calif.) Times-Standard, Aug. 26, 2007)

Since most Americans don’t read anymore—according to the latest poll—most of us probably missed this week’s news item about books. Turns out book publisher Jeremiah Kaplan may have been right more than a decade ago when he predicted the death of the word.

A new poll finds that 27 percent of Americans have not read a book in the past year—not a single book at all, not the Bible or Harry Potter or even Pat the Bunny. Conducted by the Associated Press/IPSOS, the survey shows that most Americans find reading irrelevant to their lives. Most of us, apparently, wouldn’t recognize a book if it bit them.

This is pretty depressing news as schools across the country reopen, full of eager students and—let’s face it—lots of books.

One guy from Dallas told the pollsters he hadn’t read any books in recent memory. He prefers to float and wrinkle in his backyard pool.

“I just get sleepy when I read,” said the 34-year-old telecommunications manager, unapologetically. Which probably says just about everything about the intellectual health of the Information Age.

According to the report, “The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year—half read more and half read fewer.

How is this possible? This cannot be the world in which I grew up. At this moment, I have at least seven books open on my bedside table. Without books, I’d have withered as a child and surely would long since have dithered as an adult.

“Books are like vitamins,” Clare Booth Luce once said. “When you walk into a library, you tend to pick, almost instinctively, the intellectual or the emotional vitamins you need.”

Surely America needs such sustenance. And someone must still read books. After all, the latest Harry Potter sold more than 11 million copies in its first 24 hours. But somehow, despite the efforts of J.K. Rowling, the book seems at last to be dying.

Legendary New York book publisher Jeremiah Kaplan predicted this sorry state in the mid-1990s. “Sometime in the next century,” he wrote, “we will be in a world without books, victim of the latest technological evolution in publishing.” I scoffed then, but maybe he was right.

So what toxicity has so polluted our brave new world that books gasp for breath on the sand and readers shrivel beside them? Books, said Garrison Keillor, “contain our common life and keep it against the miserable days when meanness operates with a free hand, and save it for the day when the lonesome reader opens the cover and the word is resurrected.”

But this new study of Americans’ faltering reading habits indicates that we’ve forgotten the lives that thrive between the covers of the book.

What killed the book and the vibrant and exciting worlds they contain? Was it technology—the Internet, TV, video games, ipods and telephone sex—that closed American minds? Sure, backyard pools are wonderful things—especially in Dallas in summertime. But how can lukewarm chlorine come close to washing the richness of the written word from our lives and culture?

Ever since Ooog the Caveman scratched drawings of his tribe’s great triumph over the woolly mammoth on his cave wall, we have used words to paint pictures in the mind, to tell sweeping tales of great deeds and events, both real and fantasy, to escape into and to inspire us.

Words on the page—or on cave walls, in letters or diaries or newspapers or books—take us out of ourselves into other lives and times and places, where people like us can do other things and where we can understand what it is to be and to understand other lives.

Books aren’t about publishing. As any Hogwarter can tell you, books are about ideas and dreams and courage and pain and love and loss and about the greater good that lives in all human souls. Lord knows, books are about more than reality TV or the Internet.

But this survey on the death of the book is worrisome.

I’m not worried about books disappearing--at least not in my house. Just because knuckledraggers from Dallas (or down the road in Crawford) can’t crack a book, that doesn’t mean that I won’t.

I do worry, though, what that means for the larger society. If more than 25 percent of Americans don’t read books, they probably also don’t read newspapers, they don’t pay attention to the news, they never pause to reflect about the world, and they surely don’t wonder or care much about why things are they way they are.

What saddens and frightens me about this latest evidence of American sloth is not that books themselves will perish, but that, even as we float in the end-of-summer swimming pool, that ideas and concepts about the world and humanity—about what we are and who we can be—might.

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Ted Pease is a columnist and journalism professor.