no one is reading anymore

i was reading the news paper yesterday and found an article about how book sales have droped as well as newspaper and magazine,it said "the number of books sold droped by nearly 44 million between 2003 and 2004."and this has already hit new paper and magazines a couple years ago, it looks like this is turning into fherinhite 451,it also says the sale of cable and moives is up. this is so sad i think more people should be reading rather then siting at home watching tv

 

I've been thinking about that a lot lately, too. It's sad to be living in a day and age where people look at you funny when you're reading outside of a school assignment, ya know? As for the newspaper/magazine prices going down, that's not illiteracy or laziness. That's the Internet. They say within 20 years you won't even be able to buy print anymore. It'll all be on the Web.

 

On the positive note, some of the decline in book sales and print has to do with the internet. As a lit major, if I could read a book online or out of the library with out having to buy it, that worked a lot better for me.

 

I have thought of this too. That in time,most things will come in digital format instead of print. I'm not surprised sells are down,because people can get so much information online. They can read books online also.
Personally,I rarely buy a book from a store. I either go to the library or I buy books on ebay.
I do buy a newspaper often and I buy magazines if there are enough articles that I want to keep,otherwise I get those at the library too.

 

It's strange... Nowdays, the question I get asked when I meet new people is not "what do you read?" but "do you read?"

 

yeah i was camping last weekend and my anut asked me what the book was i reading for school and i told it wasnt for school i just like to read, she said "oh..." like it was weird or something its kind of sad

 

Ditto Viola

See I've heard sales are on the up. In the UK at least, reading has got kind of trendy. With book clubs being established through TV shows and newspapers. So it seems promising.
I shan't give up hope until the numbers drop to 0, which will never happen.

Even so there has been a general decline for years, I have always been a devote of literature and got some strange looks for that from my peers, and some pretty patronising comments from adults.

 

I'm not sure how people read large amounts on the computer. It stings my eyes and i can never get comfortable.

 

and you cant bring a computar every where you go unless you spend money for a laptop and even then its trouble some battery power and internet connection and size, i dont think the internet will replace books

 

i agree. i hate reading more than a few paragraphs online. i'd rather scunch up on the couch with a good book or read at the bus stop or on the bus or something. and you can reread your faves and trade with friends and books smell good too

 

I wasn't saying that the internet will replace books entirely. That will never happen, cause there are too many dorks like me who like to collect books.


But, online literature is a great thing, and more and more people are using it to their advantage. You don't have to have a computer to read it, all you have to do is hit the print button. Many of my professors have referred us to the internet if we didn't want to buy a book. Or if a book is out of print but still available online. Many of the anglo-saxon lit I read this semester came from the internet because it wasn't in my textbook, some of the better universities like Harvard and Yale have created some great web-sites with ancient lit on them, which is getting harder to find.

Plus, some of the online texts are so awesomely made. I was looking at a site for Gullivers Travels and the professor that had made it had also created a seperate glossary and you could click right on words in the text and it would take you right to the definition. Some website designers do that for footnotes as well. I found one site that had family trees of characters and all kinds of extra goodies at the click of the mouse.

It's a good time to be a literature major, to say the least.

 

When I enter a bookstore (specially those that have rare, old books) and I can smell that particular scent they have, I find bliss. Ok, maybe I'm weird, but I just love books. They make me feel that death is just an illusion and that as long as those books remain with the living, their authors will also remain with us. When I read a book I feel that time stops and past and present merge in a perfect union. Since I was a little girl I get this same feeling. I remember being about 5 years old and thinking that if I read a book I could live in its world at least for a while, I imagined I talked to its characters and lived their adventures...
Books will never be replaced... at least I hope so...

 

I have never thought people read much, at least not nearly as much as I did. Now I do most of my reading online, but books are still more comfortable to read.

If sales continue to be low, we're not going to have any excuse to keep clearing the forests off the face of the earth..... other than toilet paper and all that oversized disposable cardboard packaging.

 

Clover: I too love the smell of an old book. I've got an amazing little book store up the street. I always manage to find some little work of art of a book for 2$. I always come out of there smiling, smelling some old yellow paged book. I found an old hardback anthology of all of HG Wells stories for $4, and it just smells so good! Reads pretty well too!

 

I would not blame this on the internet. The media is to blame (other than the idioticy of people, ofcourse). The media is manipulating people of a weaker state of mind out of reading and into its web of continious consumer logic modification.

 

Wow! What a great thread! I see I'm not the only reader. I do a lot of reading for my job--I'm a teacher--so maybe I don't read as much in my spare time as I might otherwise.

However, I read 100 novels last year, and I'm on track to read even more this year. I also read magazines and newspapers pretty regularly. My hometown newspaper is a conservative rag, so I read the Plain Dealer out of Cleveland.

Many of the books I read come from my city's library. I've got a discount card at one of the national bookstore chains here in the US and that helps some. At the moment, I'm finishing Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

My online reading is mostly confined to chat rooms and forums.

 

I love to read. I always have, and I learned to love the excitement of a good book from my parents. We always read at home and had lots of books available to us. I think that is missing in too many homes now. Although, the more I think about it, it was probably missing when I was younger, too.
I think the most important thing is for parents to read to children. I started reading to my daughter before she could even talk. She loves to read and we still read together almost every night. It is so wonderful. She is a very smart little girl and I think her intelligence is directly related to reading.

 

In 20 years or so we'll probably carry our entire book collection on our PDA, I think it'll be nice if everything went digital. Save more tree's that way.

 

We must be in the minority. We spent about $200.00 (not including magazines and papers) on books in the last month. Hmmmmmm. We DO have a big family, but still........

I go into people's houses for my profession. When I used to work as a Post partum Doula, I used to spend all day in people's houses. I have found that the number of, size of and prominent placement of Televisions is inversely proportionate to the number of books in a house! GIANT big ass screen TV in the main room, with all the chairs pointing at it, TV in every bedroom (even the kid's) TV in the kitchen, even in the bathroom: chances are you won't find a book in that house. (sometimes not even a magazine in the potty!) Houses with piles of books all over, and books in the bathroom, bookshelves with BOOKS in them, not knick knacks, on the stairs, the bedrooms the kitchens, open, facedown on the porch ect, usually have probably one or two TVs, usually in a closable entertainment center, or just on a table somewhere. Not as the main feature of the house.

There's nothing inherently wrong with TV, IMO, it is a tool, I watch it, but there has to be balance.

 

Shaba...I agree, I like the idea of being able to carry all of a literature collection digitally on one type of gadget. how awesome would that be??? Saving paper. It would completely revolutionize the college text book industry. How I would have loved to be able to carry all my texts on a PDA!

Maggie Sugar...very interesting observations. We have 2 tvs, one is huge, and the other is locked in a cabinet, not even plugged up. My husband is a gadget person, not a reader. So our house is a mix between the two! I've got my book case kinda hidden because 1. I don't want my super christian family to see all my pagan literature and 2. it's close to my back door, and I've been reading out in the yard lately. And, usually you can find numerous books strewn through the house, in just about every room. Now that I'm done with school, I've managed to keep my collection confined to my book shelf.

But I've only got one tiny book shelf and it's completely full to the max. Most of my college textbooks are in my closet, and I have a whole row of books on the top shelf in there! When ever we move to a new house, one of my requirements is going to be book shelves in the walls. I want my own library

In fact, my books might as well have a dewy decimal (is that how it's spelled) system plastered all over it, I'm so anal with how my books are arranged. I probably should be a librarian. hehe.

I thought it would be a cool job to create personal libraries for people. My aunt had made a comment once that she would love for me to go find her good books in a certain genre for her collection, and I thought, that could be a pretty cool job. Just hunting for unique books and creating libraries for people according to their tastes. Too bad it just doesn't seem like a job that would make any money in my area.