I’m told I learned to read when I was 2, (apparently) shortly after I learned to talk. I think my parents used some flash cards for letter recognition to learn the alphabet, and readings of Dr. Seuss also helped, but no one really pushed me into learning to read.

However, I think that bad teaching practices in early years (combined with parental apathy) are more responsible for letting children miss out on the pleasures and scholastic achievements associated with reading than any early “forcing”, but that’s admittedly not supported by any scholarly evidence.

John Holt used to argue that the reason many people don’t read much (and can’t read complex material very well) is because they were pressured into learning to read before they were ready, in kindergarten or first grade. He had a lot of anecdotal evidence of home-schooled (”unschooled” I think was his preferred term) children whose parents read to them but didn’t push them to learn to read until they wanted to, who became avid readers at ages 7, 8, 9, maybe even older.

But this problem of pushing some subset of kindergarteners and first-graders to read before they’re ready has been around for a long time and I doubt it’s gotten markedly worse, at least in the U.S., since Holt wrote. So I doubt it’s a major component of the recent decline in reading, if there is in fact a recent decline in reading.

There was a time when I averaged a book a day. That was as a teenager. After a while that dropped down to something like 0.5 books/day, then while I was pretending my eyesight wasn’t deteriorating, down to more like 0.25. Since I gave in and bought some supermarket reading glasses, it’s back up to 0.5 again.

Something of the gap was taken up by video games and DVDs (I haven’t watched broadcast or cable TV in years), but mainly it’s that I used to inhale books quickly, and now I appreciate the language much more than before, and that slows down the reading process.

On a completely unrelated topic, since it comes to mind for some reason, I just read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (recently reprinted by Penguin). For those starved for any more Paarfi or quality Dumas, this is an amusing little repast. The period is Napoleonic, not Musketeer, but the sensibility is similar, if more comic.

Anyhow, returning to topic, one presumes that eventually the publishing industry will go the way of the recording industry in terms of irreversibly downward-trending revenues for major publishers due to ripped electronic distribution. After all, it’s even easier to rip text than it is to rip music; you don’t even have to worry about watermarks, and photography (with optional OCR) will easily get around hardware-based DRM controls.

But that day hasn’t come yet, since the Kindle and other electronic formats are still considerably inferior in quality of reading experience to any kind of book. Eventually, however, the big German publishers will just have to bite the bullet and fold down operations to a much lower level, and writers will have to come up with more direct forms of remuneration for their work, along with secondary income sources surrounding cheaper electronically published works. I don’t think this will be a very positive change for most professional writers, despite the extortionate terms squeezed out by most current publishers, but I think it will still be possible to make a living through writing.

A guy I know who works for one of these second hand bookstore (Booksale), said that they have buyers in the U.S., who do nothing but buy and import books all year round (which is how I ended up reading about a certain assassin… LOL!). I think that’s the reason why the book industry think reading is declining, they’re looking at the wrong place, they should be checking out how well the used bookstores are doing.

If I was a superman, one of the many products I would have produced would have been an ebook subscription site for out-of-copy short stories (my preferred medium). Especially some of those short stories written only for conventions that never made it into mainstream collections. I have all the technical skills, I’ve just never gotten around to going door-to-door with the publishers to arrange agreements.

[anecdotal] Most of my library has been entered at the previously mentioned site. I haven’t gotten to my son’s shelves yet. You can check it out by looking up my user name (same as here). I’ve been after my son to read for close to 4 years now (him being 10) and only recently he came to me and stated, “I just realized that there’s more information in the book than there is in the movie.” It was all I could do to stop from saying, “Duh!” Well, it wasn’t that hard to stop myself. I am his dad.

[anecdotal] Related to above: I heard that some Scandinavian country tried an experiment in which they had some success improving male reading habits by not bothering to try to teach them how until they were eight. Seems about right to me. My son didn’t pick one up on his own until about then even though both parents read to him on a regular basis. I’m fairly certain he knew how, but was simply not interested.

[conjectural] It is interesting to see that people believe reading habits are waning when in fact they are not. Blogs, street signs, and even text-messaging have supplanted some of the the time people have set aside for reading. For a few individuals this constitutes all the time they set aside for reading.

What is it they are reading? Is it the original language of their birth. I would say that not all blogs are written in the same language or are, at best, some mutated dialect form of it. The parental lament, “They just don’t speak my language,” is slowly becoming true. Children don’t want to read the way they are taught to speak (if they are taught to speak properly), but would rather ingest the small, factual, or completely fabricated bits of information floating around in the various media. It is almost analogous to my not wanting to read Proust. I understand him, and that killer (as in two dead – author and translator) text, I just don’t wanna read it.

[scary thought] When the oil runs out, the children of today will be in charge. Will they have forgotten how to make books? Will they have forgotten how to research without Google and Wikipaedia (I refuse to spell it their way)?

Of course my trust in them may be misplaced and next national book week the press is going to announce that many book publications are now out of business but I think think it’s a safe bet to say that they know what they’re doing.