Readings, Rated
On the Media
In case you missed it this weekend, WBEZ’s On the Media took on books and the publishing industry. Bob Garfield started the convo by saying “The new media are thriving. The old media are dying. That seems to be the theme of our program from week to week to week. But, of course, it’s much more complicated than that because increasingly the old and new are merging into one another. This week, we’re devoting the program to the oldest of old media - books.” They went on to discuss the usual stuffs: the death of print, “green” paper, e-books & e-readers, if the public has an inherent love of paper. Most promising to me was the idea that with Borders going down and print on demand becoming more feasible, the publishing industry was actually equalizing. Maybe the sky isn’t falling? (Of course, on the more depressing side of things was the mention of the NEA study that “found reading proficiency declining across the board and that nearly half of Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.” Egads!)
Something else to chew on: book trailers. Video killed the radio star.
Something else to chew on would be Ursula LeGuin’s essay “Staying Awake” in the February 2008 Harpers (unfortunately, it’s locked away for online subscribers only). In it, she touches on this supposed decline of reading, arguing that readers have always been in the minority and that in the course of human history reading for pleasure is rarer still. She also argues that corporate capitalism and literature don’t mix and that the coming death of mastodons like Borders could mean a revival in literary publishing. That’s a severely simplified summary (and that’s a lot of alliteration) but the full essay is well worth the search.
And one fussy correction: On the Media is produced by WNYC not WBEZ.