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Are people still reading?

Technology has affected the way we do so many things. From banking to shopping to daily communication, the internet has taken over many aspects of our lives, and gadgets like iPods and Nintendo Wii fill up our free time. But how has technology affected the way we read? With so many other ways to garner information, do people read books anymore?

Shift in our reading habits
According to Reuters Life!, even though reading rates are declining, people are still reading books. More than one third of Americans read more than 10 books a year, according to a market research survey. The National Endowment for the Arts’ 2004 Reading at Risk report said that 93 million American adults read novels or short stories for pleasure in the previous year.

However, as indicated by another survey released in 2006 by Jupiter Research, 37 percent of adults read books less frequently than before they started regularly using the internet. While some experts are concerned that a decline in the reading rate could mean that we are “dumbing down” as a society, others interpret it not as a decline, but as a shift toward electronic-based communications that require new measuring standards.

Does it matter what we read? While these statistics show that people are reading less books, that doesn’t mean they are reading less in general. Many people read newspapers and magazines – and almost everyone reads online content – every day. Some would argue that daily reading actually makes them more informed than book readers. And when it comes down to it, they are still reading, even though it’s on a computer screen.

“Odds are that you are reading these words on a computer monitor,” says author Steven Johnson in his February 2008 article for The Guardian. “Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink?”

Additionally, Johnson continues, we are writing more, and writing in public for strangers. Novel readers may have declined in the past decade, but the number of bloggers has gone from zero to 25 million.

Are kids reading?
Today’s youngest generation is one of the first to be raised in a society where computers are as common as televisions, and it will be interesting to see how that eventually affects their reading rates. However, phenomena like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series show that kids will read – or even devour – books as long as the content is stimulating enough to hold their interest. The series has been credited with turning kids into lifelong readers, an impressive feat in today’s all-digital world.

Combining books with technology Web sites like LibraryThing (www.librarything.com), Whichbook (www.whichbook.net) and BookSwim (www.bookswim.com) prove that there is a way to bring good old-fashioned book reading into the technology age. LibraryThing is an online service that allows users to easily catalog their own books, connects people with other users who have similar tastes, and makes suggestions for future reads. Users can tag their books with their own subjects, or they can use the Library of Congress and Dewey systems. About one year after the conception of LibraryThing, members had cataloged about nine million books; now, that number has reached more than 26 million. Whichbook allows users to find books based on their mood. Readers use sliding scales to determine whether they want the book to be happy or sad, short or long, etc., or anywhere in between. For example, a user could search for a book that is very happy, a little bit unpredictable and somewhat violent. Users also can search for books based on character type, plot elements or geographic setting.

BookSwim is a book rental club that offers unlimited monthly subscription plans and free shipping. Similar to Netflix (www.netflix.com), subscribers order their books from a list of over 200,000 titles, the items are shipped directly to their home at no charge, and they can keep the books for as long as they want without worrying about late fees. If a member receives a book that he decides he wants to keep, he simply purchases it from BookSwim.

Sites like these and many others (www.amazon.com, www.whatshouldireadnext.com, www.lovereading.co.uk, www.allconsuming.net) show that regardless of the decline in reading rates, books still have a strong place in today’s technology-driven world. Combining books with the internet is a great way to keep books relevant.

Although our reading habits have shifted and we rely more on online content for our daily reading dose, it's refreshing to know that people are, in fact, still reading.