American Readership is Way Down

Here I go being Cassandra again but I need to say this. It has past emergency levels and is now a catastrophe: Americans are not reading. It's a serious and definite threat to our democracy. We will lose everything that this country stands for and holds dear if we don't start reading.

John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, thinks that losing Book Reviews is a serious problem (listen to him on NPR). Although I sympathize with his point, I think he is looking at a symptom and thinking that it is the problem. The industry is cutting back on advertisement of books in literary supplements because they are loosing money. They are losing money because adults are not reading. And, thus, the book industry as a whole is falling apart because the audience of readers is shrinking. Book sales are way down. (Trust me, I know this is a fact!) I think that as an industry our time would be better spent encouraging a reading campaign for the whole country — challenging everyone in the country to start reading again.

As our population stops reading, we lose a lot of cognitive thinking ability — the critical thinking that we need to make decisions that affect our future. It's that simple. We would not have been so fooled by the current regime in the White House if we were reading. We would not been tricked into a war if we were reading. We would not be losing our middle class if we were reading. We would not be losing our white color jobs to overseas workers if we were reading. We would not be having contenders for the Presidency of the United States raising their hands saying that they don't believe in evolution if we were reading.

Things were going wrong before Bush got into office. Our schools were physically falling apart and our test scores were going down. Remember, Bush went into office as the "Education President." It's laughable now (it was laughable then). He was supposed be working on reversing this trend. Obviously this has not been happening, it is getting much, much worse. To fix this we need take charge of our own education. We need to get literate so we can be competitive as a country and also enable us to make better choices for our political leaders. Reading can fix a lot of holes in a person's education.

So get to reading. We need to encourage our children to read. Start getting on the schools to make sure your children are reading, too. Read to your children while they are young. Make sure that they have summer reading lists of a minimum of 10 books. Have them deliver a report to you at the end of summer about what they've read.

This is an emergency.

Update: The May 9, 2007 article Last exit to book land from Salon.com supports what I'm saying here.