Friday, October 8, 2010

Topic: Competition for Reading Books



10-second review: People don’t read many physical books any more because there is so much competing technology [not to mention Kindle. RayS.]

Title: “Consider a Multiplatform Approach.” S Saffel. The Writer (August 2009), 40-41.

Quote: Your book [that you have written] has many enemies. Time spent surfing the Web, texting a friend, playing a video game, or watching a film on You Tube is time that used to belong to books. These competing media “platforms” are seducing your readers. And the Multimedia world is here to stay.”

Comment: Consider this quote from William Zinsser’s book, On Writing Well (1980): “The reader is a person with an attention span of about twenty seconds, assailed on every side by forces competing for his time by newspapers and magazines, by television and radio and stereo, by his wife and children and pets, by his house and yard and all the gadgets that he has bought to keep them spruce and by that most potent competition, sleep.”

Is it any wonder that kids don’t spend much time reading books? And reading, like unused parts of the body, “use it or lose it.” Of course, they are reading—just not books. Much of what is on the Internet consists of print. What they are not doing is reading “serious” books or even for entertainment during their leisure, which gradually causes them to lose the habit of reading—books.

One thing we can do is change our approach to readingbooks. Show them how to find ideas fast. It’s ideas that are the reason for reading anyhow. That and entertainment, which has been replaced by film. Next blog, I will explain what I mean. RayS.

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