Don't Judge a Book....

In case you missed it, the National Endowment for the Arts announced last week that Americans, in particular, teenagers and young adults, are reading less. A sobering but perhaps, not surprising statistic. All this in a week when Amazon launched its new electronic reader, Kindle, which is billed as an ipod for books.

Obviously books have a lot of competition these days from everything wired, from ipods to computers to television to cell phones. Why read a newspaper when you can get your news from the Daily Show? Why read a magazine when you can get the scoop from television? And why read a book when you can see the movie on your computer?

Why indeed? The romantic notion of escape through language to another place or time seems hopelessly outdated on many levels and the concept of finding the truth by turning pages, particularly in non-fiction, seems painfully slow in comparison with the Internet. We are clearly not spawning a new generation of readers in the old sense. They read, but only if we grab their attention and let them participate in the process.

I believe the future of publishing is very much tied to the digital age. Even as I try to get a book published by the antique method, I launch a blog to hopefully bring readers along on the journey and let them participate in the process through comments. With one foot in the way it's always been, I think I need to have another in the way it's going to have to be, to make both methods succeed.

It's complicated but I also think that baby boomers like us, the ones who grew up escaping through the pages of books, are too large a force to ignore. We may be aging, but we still like to read and there are simply too many of us to bury the hardback, just yet.

Ideally, we have spawned our children in our own images--surrounding them with books and encouraging them to read--but we may have been too busy learning the new methods of communication to have given it our best. Clearly they are going to reinvent the book just like we reinvented the way women work, and it will be better for all those who have a stake in the industry, to pay attention to their tinkerings.