Nowadays, there is enough private space. The wash of noise is not a serious obstacle to people who want to read, even if they do not wear noise cancellation headphones. And never were books published at more affordable prices than today. Some books reside on the shelves of the Internet or are integrated in broader hyper- books on the World Wide Web. A word from one book-let's say a new concept built upon earlier language experiences-connects the interested reader to other books and articles, as well as to voices that read texts, to songs, and to images. The book is no longer a self-sufficient entity, but a medium for possible interaction.
At the threshold of the civilization of illiteracy, how many books are printed? In which medium? How many are sold? Are they read? How? By whom? These are only some of the questions to be posed when approaching the subject of books. Even more important is the "Why?"-in particular, "Why read books?"-the real test of the book's legitimacy, and ergo, the legitimacy of the civilization which the book emblemizes. The broader issue is actually reading and writing, or to be more precise, the means through which an author can address many readers.
The fine balance of factors involved in the publishing and success of a book is extremely difficult to describe. The general trend in publishing can be described as more and more titles in smaller and smaller editions. Ideally, a good manuscript (of a novel, book of poetry, plays, essays, scientific or philosophic writings) should become a successful book, i.e., one that sells. In the reality of the book business, many mediating elements determine the destiny of a manuscript. Most of these elements are totally unrelated to the quality of writing or to the satisfaction of reading. They reflect market processes of valuation.
These elements are symptomatic of the book's condition in the civilization that moves towards the pragmatics of many competing literacies, almost all contradicting the intrinsic characteristics of literacy embodied in the book. The life of books is shorter (despite their being printed on acid-free paper). Books have a decreasing degree of universality; more books address limited groups of readers as opposed to a large general market, not to mention the whole of humankind, as was once the book's purpose. Books use specialized languages, depending on their topics. The distinct ways these languages convey contents frequently contradict the culturally acknowledged condition of the book, and are a cause of concern to people who are the products of (or adherents to) a civilization based on books. More and more books end up as collections of images with minimal commentary. Some are already delivered together with a tape cassette or compact disk, to be heard rather than read, to be seen rather than to engage the reader's mind. Road Reading is a billboard trademark for recorded books. Narrated by voices appropriate to the subject (a southern drawl for a story like To Kill a Mockingbird; a cultivated voice for Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities), the books compete with red lights, landscapes, and other signs along the road. Many books written in our day contain vulgar language and elevate slang to the qualitative standard of fiction. There are books that promise the excitement of a game (find the object or the criminal). A reward, effectively replacing the satisfaction of reading, will be handed to the lucky finder. The subject of reading has also changed since the time the Bible and other religious texts, dramas and poetry, philosophic and scientific writings were entrusted to the printing press. Melodramatic fiction, at least 200 years old, paved the way for pulp fiction and today's surefire bestsellers based on gossip and escapism.
Our goal is to understand the nature of change in the book's condition, why this change is a cause for concern, as well as our own relation to books. To do this, we should examine the transition that defines the identity and role of the writer and reader in the new pragmatic context.
Why don't people read books?
"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" Clarisse McClellan asks in Fahrenheit 451. (This book is also available in video format and as a computer game.) Guy Montag, the fireman, answers, "That is against the law." This conversation defines a context: The group that still reads is able to pass the benefits of their experience to people who are not allowed to read books. In our days, no fireman is paid to set books ablaze. To the contrary, many people are employed to save deteriorating books printed in the past. But the question of whether people read any of the books they buy or receive, or even save from destruction, cannot be dismissed.
The majority of the books changing hands and actually read are reference publications. The home contains an increasing number of radios, television sets, CD players, electronic games, video cassette recorders, and computers. The shelf space for books is being taken up by other media. Instead of the personal library, people consecrate space in their homes for media centers that consume a great deal of their free time. Instead of the permanence of the printed text, they prefer the variability of continually changing programs, of scanning and sampling, and of surfing the Internet. The digital highway supplies an enormous amount of reference material. This material is, moreover, kept up to date, something that is not so easy to accomplish with bound sets of encyclopedias or even with the telephone book.
Books are not burned, but neither are they read with much commitment. Scanning through a story or reading the summary on the flip jacket, filling one's time during a commute or at the airport is all that happens in most cases. A variety of books are written for such purposes. Required reading for classes, according to teachers, cannot exceed the attention span of their pupils. Growing up under the formative influence of short cycles and the expectation of quick conclusions to their acts, youngsters oppose any reading that is not to the point (as they see it). In most cases, outlines provide whatever knowledge (information is probably a better word) is needed for a class or for a final examination. The real filter of reading is the multiple choice grid, not the satisfaction of immersion in a world brought to life by words.
All this is almost the end of the story, not the substance of its arguments. The arguments are manifold and all related to characteristics of literacy. In the first place, publishers simply discard the traditional reverence for books. They realize that a book placed somewhere on the pedestal of adulation, extended from the religious Book to books in general, keeps readers away or makes them captive to interpretive prejudices.