Reading in the Twenty-First Century: The Last Five Years

(From “Surviving a Digital Disruption: Smart e-Book Publishing, Small Houses” by Victoria Sandbrook, Emerson College, December 2009)

Reading in the twenty-first century: the last five years. If the publishing industry is going to survive for another two hundred years or longer, however, there must be enough readers to keep the sales afloat, if not growing. Thankfully, the general perception that the American people read less than in previous eras in history has recently been quantified, debated, and reworked. As we rounded into the twenty-first century on the crest of the dot-com bubble, publishers could claim that a lack of information on digital reading habits was enough to keep them from investing in digital publishing. Similarly, the state of reading as an American pastime seemed to be in question, assuring that publishers trying to play it safe would avoid investing in new formats without some assurance that reading was still relevant to enough Americans to support the industry. However, the last five years have shown a great change in both opinion and statistical data regarding American reading habits and skill. But the outlook was initially bleak. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) published Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America which studied reading habits in American adults over the decades between 1982 and 2002. The report lists “10 Key Findings” that identify declines in literary reading across all age groups, gender groups, ethnic groups, types of books (literary and otherwise), and education levels, while tying lower reading to lower civic participation rates and “increased participation in a variety of electronic media, including the Internet, video games, and portable digital devices” (NEA, Reading at Risk ix-xii). Published “at a critical time, when electronic media are becoming the dominant influence in young people’s worlds,” the report correlates the marked decline in reading with the rise in ubiquity and popularity of electronic media (NEA, Reading at Risk ix, xii). To NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, online reading and engagement with electronic media simply will not replace the experience of traditional reading: “print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability …would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment” (qtd. in NEA, Reading At Risk vii). Beyond the academic effects of low reading rates and the possible cultural effects of electronic media, the NEA recognized the potentially game-changing implications the decline in reading would have for anyone involved in book publishing and sales, even as some thought the report simply restated what so many industry professionals had already observed. Charles McGrath, a writer at large for the New York Times, published a jaded response in “Stranger Than Fiction; What Johnny Won’t Read” that found nothing surprising about the pessimistic outlook: “Instead of combing through the census, the NEA researchers could have reached many of the same conclusions simply by talking to a couple of observant booksellers.”

Over the next few years statistics and publishing industry’s outlook grew darker, even as public opinion started changing. Results of an AP/Ipsos poll published in Associated Press writer Alan Fram’s “One in Four Read No Books Last Year” caused a brief flurry of panic with results that seemed to indicate that reading had suddenly ceased to be a relevant pastime for the American adult. In Fram’s estimate, “The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous,” and though he included statistics that should have lessened the blow, the final quote essentially sealed the pessimistic tone: “‘Fiction just doesn’t interest me,’ said Bob Ryan, 41, who works for a construction company in Guntersville, Ala[bama]. ‘If I’m going to get a story, I’ll get a movie.’” The industry seemed crushed, but not entirely surprised. In “Are Books Becoming Obsolete?,” writer and blogger for The Huffington Post Carol Hoenig, ponders the root of these findings, pointing toward the fast pace of American culture and energy it takes just to make ends meet; “We clock in overtime and forfeit vacations in order to pay the mortgage, and at the end of the day, most just want to collapse in front of the television with the remote in one hand, a beverage in the other, and not have to think.” The eighteen comments logged on the blog post page, however, show mixed reactions and signs of growing trust in the very activities blamed for the decline in reading. Comments from otherwise anonymous readers leftLibertarian and tililek are typical, quippy pans about the media and elitism, and KrazyKat barks orders like “Kill your television set” (qtd. in Hoenig). On the other hand, reader 1will plainly states “I doubt that books will ever become obsolete,” noting the activity in local bookstores and their growing popularity with middle-grade readers (qtd. in Hoenig). Others readers, like mckinley, go so far as to challenge the types of reading the report measured: “Ironically, I find internet literature such as this—articles you can post responses to, IM chatting and roleplaying (creating my own literature with someone else), chatrooms—MUCH [sic] more fulfilling than reading a book by myself in a corner of my living room…” (qtd. in Hoenig). As the news of the poll was shared, these reactions joined with a growing question: one in four adults may not read books, but does that mean we should be disappointed that three in four adults do read? Knowing that as many as three-quarters of adults were reading something heartened many in the publishing industry, but without a nod from the NEA acknowledging a change, many were left to debate who had the story right—if anyone did.

Just a few months later the NEA released follow-up report: To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. NEA Chairman Dana Gioia’s preface to the report seemed to distance itself from the AP/Ipsos poll while attempting to rouse public action through the same worry that had just started to subside. After identifying the source of the report’s data— a collation of figures from “national studies conducted on a regular Basis by U.S. federal agencies, supplanted by academic, foundation, and business surveys”—Gioia calls the results “simple, consistent, and alarming” (qtd. in NEA, To Read 5). Sure enough, the report details a decline in every age group—including elementary school students who weren’t included in the 2004 report—and evidence of rapidly declining reading comprehension scores for thirteen- and seventeen-year-olds (NEA, To Read 27, 29, 56). In expounding on the impact of dropping scores and decreased interest even in young readers, Gioia predicts a societal snowball effect:

As Americans, especially younger Americans, read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they have lower levels of academic achievement….With lower levels of reading and writing ability, people do less well in the job market. Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement. Significantly worse reading skills are found among prisoners than in the general adult population. And deficient readers are less likely to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting.  (qtd. in NEA, To Read 5)

Though Gioia admits that the study cannot statistically indicate cause and effect, he does postulate—admittedly “At the risk of being criticized by social scientists”— that where data shows “linear relationships between reading and these positive results [e.g., civic involvement, employment, academic success]—and between poor reading and negative results—reading has played a decisive factor” (qtd. in NEA, To Read 6).

Much news coverage at the time of the report’s publication focuses on the worst details of To Read rather than on finding a solution as Gioia resolved in his preface. In an NPR radio interview with Gioia entitled “Study: Americans Reading Less Than They Used To,” Talk of the Nation host Lynn Neary exposes what seems to be a deep distrust of “internet reading.” Neary queries Gioia as to whether technological literacy increases a likelihood of a less traditionally literate public, if only because the technology competes better for one’s time and energy; Gioia admits that “readers and non-readers do exactly the same thing”— both surf the internet and watch television—but that “the first generation of Americans who have been raised with all of these [forms of ] electronic media read significantly less than they did before…And in general their academic completion rates are lower” (Neary). He later goes so far as to worry that a loss of literacy will mean a loss of Democracy, even as communication seemingly improves through the internet. An Associated Press article circulated by Fox News, “Americans Reading Less, Study Finds,” turns to the NEA’s Director of Research Sunil Iyengar and President of Penguin Young Readers Group Doug Whiteman to discredit hope that the publishing industry’s sales were proof that reading wasn’t in decline. Iyengar pointed to the sales inflation brought on by Harry Potter fandom, not so subtly implying that one book series cannot sustain a whole industry, nor the reading habits of a country (Associated Press). Whiteman noted that adults who purchased Harry Potter books were increasing the size of the teen book market without actually adding to the numbers of teens who were reading for pleasure; simply stated, “Reading scores don’t necessarily have any relevance to today’s sales” (Associated Press).

Again, chatter across the internet revealed public optimism rooted too deeply for the NEA report to singe. During NEA Charman Dana Gioia’s radio interview, Professor Kevin Starr—the former state librarian of California and an instructor at the University of Southern California—argues that increased online reading may be more familiar to society than the traditional reading the NEA values:

if we look across time in terms of, say, Western culture or even culture—human culture in general, it’s been a very brief period of time that everybody read [sic]. We look at the Medieval Period, the Renaissance, the Modern Era, where all the masterpieces of our civilization were written. Those are written within the context of a fundamental illiteracy or orality on the part of most of the population. So in one sense, it’s back to the future as we move forward and find that this experiment of fusing everybody onto literate culture is undergoing tremendous stress….I don’t think we [should] condemn … our population, especially as this statistics [sic] begin to show an extraordinary amount of younger people who grow up in this self-navigating, digitally related culture—and I think the digital culture is equivalent to the oral culture of a previous period. (qtd. in Neary)

The New York Times article “Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading” by Motoko Rich cites Stephen Krashen—a professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California—who casts doubt on the statistics themselves; Krashen’s analysis of similar studies showed that “the endowment appeared to be exaggerating the decline in reading scores” and that scores had actually dropped in the early 1990’s. Rich also quotes a former president of the International Reading Association and professor of urban education and reading at the University of Illinois in Chciago, Timothy Shanahan: “‘I don’t disagree with the NEA’s notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the reading that I think young people are really doing,’” (qtd. in “Study Links Drop in Test Scores”). Shanahan’s and Starr’s support of online reading as a valid intellectual and academic pastime were among the first expert opinions publicly authenticating digital content, but would not be the last.

Two extended opposition pieces surfaced in the days and weeks following To Read’s publication. Ben Vershbow hosted a response to the report by Nancy Kaplan on The Institute for the Future of the Book’s if:book blog. The post, entitiled “Reading Responsibly: Nancy Kaplan on the NEA’s Data Distortion” focused on the statistical significance of the NEA’s findings. Kaplan displays a series of graphs—ones from government organizations that ran the initial surveys and studies, alongside those from the To Read—and examines the misleading proportions the NEA’s report has given its visual aids: “Although the data represented in the NEA version are strictly speaking accurate, they nevertheless seriously distort the data set from which they were derived…by truncating the data set and by representing irregular time intervals with regularized spatial intervals” (Kaplan). Ultimately she takes issue with the idea that there is “any relationship, let alone a causal one, between voluntary reading of books and reading proficiency” (Kaplan). A second voice—that of Matthew Kirschenbaum in his Chronicle of Higher Education article “How Reading Is Being Reimagined”—seeks “not to debunk the NEA’s most recent report” but rather to “account for [the] broader context” of discourse about reading (B20). He compares the “lateral reading” of researchers using many books at once to the way we tend to read online and multitask through life, but he also wonders “[m]ust we consume a book in its entirety—start to finish, cover to cover—to say we have read it” (Kirschenbaum B20)?  With the existing paradigm of valuable reading in question, we must decide what pastimes count as engaging and purposeful reading activities. Kirschenbaum calls the NEA’s treatment of online reading “clumsy and out of touch…[tending] to homogenize ‘the computer’ without acknowledging the diversity of activity—and the diversity of reading—that takes place on its screen” (B20). He also introduces the relationship between online reading and online writing—in instant messages, on blogs, and even through text message conversations. In new relationship between reading and composition, readers and writers are synonymous (Kirschenbaum B20). A “calm, meditative engagement” seems equally present in traditional and modern readers, leading Kirschenbaum and those who agree with him to the conclusion that online reading and engagement with new forms of media is no less valuable than traditional reading (B20).

The NEA’s most recent report Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy left television viewing and other engagement with technology out of the statistics, possibly because “Literary reading is on the rise for the first time in the 26 years of the NEA’s periodic survey of US adult participation in the arts” (3).  Instead, the new 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts sought data about genres that interested adult readers and compared online and book reading trends across age, only to find that genre fiction and online reading both contributed to the increase in reading. Readers of electronic literature were overwhelmingly likely to be readers of other book content—in print or digital form (Reading on the Rise 8). With only eleven pages of content for a reader to marshal—compared to much larger documents of sixty and a hundred pages for the earlier reports—Reading on the Rise seems like a sheepish retraction in the face of widening public acceptance of online reading.

Reading studies like Jennifer Rowsell and Anne Burke’s “Reading by Design: Two Case Studies of Digital Reading Practices” frequently surface with claims that “reading content online requires a repertoire of skills, from interpreting visual clues, to mastering the nuances of subtext, to following ideas in a nonlinear fashion, to decoding of simple reading” (117). Michael DeSchryver and Rand J. Spiro, educational psychology professors from Michigan State University, published a study entitled “New Forms of Deep Learning on the Web: Meeting the Challenge of Cognitive Load in Conditions of Unfettered Exploration in Online Multimedia Environments”  arguing that “the Web is particularly well suited to support deep learning” of any type of material (135). Not only does the Internet allow readers to be empowered through effective search, but students engaging in “Web learning demonstrated a quick transition from early ‘fact-finding’ to the advanced stages of meaningful learning that involved rapid interconnectedness and abstract/problem based thinking” (Deschryver and Spiro 147).

With these and other explorations of the promises of the future of reading, the world is shedding its reservations about the very activities once globally decried as destroyers of culture and intellectual pursuits. Though opposition still abounds and more studies are sure to reveal more truths about reading and technology, it is obvious that deep change is inevitable. Tom Peters of the Library Journal believes that “something important and fundamental is happening to books and reading;” in his article “As the Book Changes Form, the Library Must Champion its Own Power Base—Readers” Peters looks to the evolution of the experience we call reading whether we are holding something “pulpy or plastic, bulky or svelte.” Because “Readers are resilient and inventive,” the fluctuating format and method of delivery will not deeply affect the future of reading (Peters). What really matters is the content and the experience in which that content engages us—two elements publishers have great control over should they decide to take up the torch.