From: MShuttleworth at slv.vic.gov.au <MShuttleworth>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:45:22 +1000

The Reading at Risk report by the NEA is a timely document, in the light of this month's discussion. Yes, I agree that it does seem hard to believe that reading is in relative decline, same base number of readers, but another 40 million Americans on the national census. So, with Oprah, book clubs, reading promotions and the like, what is going on? Not being a sociologist, and not being an American (unless that's something else our prime minister is keeping secret) I couldn't say...but, maybe it's a class/ethnicity thing.

For affluent Americans, and Australians for that matter, reading connected to leisure remains a possible choice. For the unemployed, under-employed, working poor, and the poorly educated, and those otherwise at the cultural and geographical margins, reading and book choice remains problematic, difficult, irrelevant, compared to more pressing problems. For all of these people reading is perhaps even more important as a starting point, to gain entry into the culture (see the recent documentary Spellbound for an eloquent example of this).

For me, as someone who works to promote reading to teenagers, the most striking point of the NEA report came almost of a footnote. Quoting from the New York Times report, "The steepest declines of any demographic group are among the youngerst adults. In 1982, 59.8 per cent of 18$ year olds read literature; by 2002 that figure ad dropped to 42.8 per cent."

Here I see the link with popular culture. Presumably young people now, who have grown up never not knowing a world without computers, will necessarily hold books and reading in a different light. Why read when you can google? Or you can get it at the mall? Look at the endless flow of historical dramas at the cinema. Currently it's Greek and Arthurian legend. A few years ago, nineteenth century drama. Popular culture--cinema, digital media, televison, adverrtising--has a very complex relationship to literature, history and story. But film often needs the book to ground the event that is the making and marketing of the movie. Sometimes I think the relationship is one of parasite and host body, since the secondary version
(film, novelisation, t-shirt) is never as good as the original. Like many, I feel depressed when the next celebrity book comes down the chute. Why pick on books, I wonder! Publishing wheels drive on the turn-over, or the alleged turn-over that celebrity publishing delivers. We are, whether we like it or not, married to the mob.

Authors are not celebrities, not really, though there is plenty of traffic the other way. And of course, reading is not a visual experience--you can't easily market that thing that happens when a line of text turns into pictures and ideas for the reader. For the book world, it is precisely this lack of visiblity, or the desire to make visible, that is the turning point of this debate. Hey, we're librarians. If that steep decline in reading for young people is to be at least slowed, then the book world broadly must embrace, or be embraced by, popular culture. It is already in the minority, so what choice do we have?

This is not meant to look like the white flag being hoisted in the face of overwhelming odds. I guess I'm just saying there's not much point denying that the barbarians are at the gates. A million selling book is lauded as a great hi but a movie seen by a million people would be a dud for the studio. Book publishing is necessarily tied up with wider marketing strategies. The question for us is, how to stay in the game once the grasp of compulsory education is loosened. And how to make reading a life-long and valued practise. Some of these answers do come down to how corporations derive their profits. Rupert Murdoch's interest in owning book publishing houses has more to do with copyright than a love of literature. And if there is more profit in the umpteenth remake of Batman, then it's a no-brainer for the corporates. Libraries, to take on example, need to market themselves just as aggresively, not only on the street, but in those places where (financial) support can be found. Unless we keep pace with other cultural industries, then we have the same future as the fountain pen, prized but rarely used as a tool of communication.
                                                                                    
             
                                                                                    
             
 Mike
             
                                                                                    
             
                                                                                    
             
                                                                                    
             
                                                                                    
             
                                                                                    
             
                                                                                    
             








Mike Shuttleworth Program Co-ordinator Australian Centre for Youth Literature 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 PH: 03 8664 7262 FAX: 03 9639 4143 http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/acyl/
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Received on Tue 13 Jul 2004 07:45:22 PM CDT