The literary world has long been beset by predictions that the rise of technology - particularly since the advent of e- and audiobook - would kill off the printed and bound version of books. But in her latest book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, Harvard Professor Leah Price dispels the myth of the end of the golden age of reading by suggesting that reading might not have been so uniformly great in the first place.
She spoke with RNZ's Jim Mora about who reads, the future of libraries, how different devices and infrastructure come into play and whether the medium is still the message.
Photo: 123rf
Price says reading is sometimes portrayed as virtuous as if a duality exists between digital mediums - bad, and physical books - good.
"I think it's important not to assume that if someone is reading a bound, gathered, sown hunk of printed paper they must therefore be reading some uplifting inspirational, intellectual and morally improving volume.
"The vast majority of what people have read for the past half millennium was not War and Peace, it was the printed equivalent of the kinds of ephemeral entertaining snip-bits that we access now in digital form. It was classified ads, it was the gossip column of the local newspaper.
"So I don't think there's anything magical about the printed medium, it's more a question of what we do with it."
Price also says just because someone is well-read doesn't necessarily guarantee they're a good thinker with an open mind.
"The problem with current reading may be less the digital devices through which it's mediated than the relentless pace, the ephemerality, the snippet-like nature of what we read, which to be fair was also true of much journalism in the age of print.
"So perhaps the crucial distinction isn't so much between print and electronic, as between book and journalism.
"We've always been skippers and browsers, and searchers, and I don't think that we should beat ourselves up about that fact. It seems to me we're comparing ideal apples to real oranges if we compare the way in which we do read now, with the way in which we imagine or mis-remember or fantasise that we used to read in the era of print."
Harvard Professor and author Leah Price Photo: Supplied
However, she says it's clear different media and infrastructure do shape the way we read.
During lockdown divisions were highlighted between countries which used e-books widely, and countries where print books continued to dominate. But Price says another useful way to look at this is the division between countries which use online shopping, which allows for delivery of printed books during lockdown, and those which rely on people visiting the local bookstore.
"I say that because Italy falls into the latter category," she says. "It's a country where not only do people still read primarily in print, but people also primarily buy their books in bricks and mortar bookstores, and during the lockdown the Italian publishing industry suffered catastrophic losses because people were not able to walk to the bookstore.
"Whereas in the US, where I'm based, people seem to have read quite a lot in lockdown ... but not primarily in the form of electronic books, more in the form of print books that were ordered through online websites. And audiobook borrowings we know already, were up in libraries."
Her book references Marshall McLuhan, the media and social theorist who famously proposed "the medium is the message" - the idea that the medium as a message is presented via influence how it will be perceived. Does Price think that's still true?
"It ... may be useful to think of the book as simply a useful bucket for ferrying ideas from one person's mind to another person's mind. And this is certainly a question for the medium of the audiobook - about which a decade ago we were still having arguments: 'does it count as reading when you listen to it?' "
"One of the striking historical surprises of the last decade or two has been that e-books in most countries never took off commercially, they disappointed all industry predictions, whereas audiobooks have really triumphed thanks to the MP3. And this is precisely the opposite of what turn-of-the-millennium futurologists, the heirs of Marshall McLuhan thought, that the future of reading lay with all-singing, all-dancing hypertext that would jump out at you and make noises and have sounds.
"And in some ways you could think of the audiobook as being just the opposite; it's extremely linear, extremely stripped down. There are various things that you could do with an old-fashioned print book that you can't do conveniently with an audiobook; you can't skip, you can't skim, you can't go backwards, you can't look something up.
"And the great popularity of the audiobook would seem to suggest that for some purposes, a lot of readers don't want to do any of those things. That we don't want interactivity, or choice or engagement. We want to lie back and let the story stream over us, we want to be passive."
In an age of constant demands on our attention, is the inclination or capacity to read whittled down? Price thinks it's likely, but not evenly true.
"One of the striking facts about who reads in the rich world is that, for the past couple of centuries, heavy readers of imaginative literature have been female, very young or very old. So there's essentially an empty centre in which the middle-aged man whose time has value on the paid labour market are not the ones doing most of the reading.
"It's children and retired people and women who are doing unpaid domestic labour, and that would seem to suggest that the thing that's stopping us from reading is opportunity cost. We read when we can't do anything else.
"It's a question of what else we are doing with our time — one favourable condition for literacy seems to be climates with long winters, and long dark winter nights where you can't be out and about doing other things, so there's nothing to do except read. And these days, in the long winter nights there are plenty of other things that we could be doing."
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How literate a population is should be expanded to include wider practical forms and definitions, she says.
"How much is literacy about the literary, how much is it about instrumental practical uses of the word, and how much is literacy about the written word as opposed to reading maps and diagrams and different ways of navigating the world?"
She says we used to read aloud, and read together more.
"It sometimes depresses me to think that in the past most adults were regularly read to, but today the only people who have the great luxury of being read aloud to by a human being known to them, physically present and live and in the same room, are children below the age of 8 or so."
The wealthy frequently had servants read aloud to them, and those not rich enough to hire their own "human audiobooks", would listen to the news read out loud in pubs, or listen to children read while doing work like sewing.
"It's depressing that now we have the option of a recorded voice reading aloud to us, but it's very rare for literate adults to read aloud to one another."
Will libraries and books survive into the future?
"Looking at the near future and thinking about the current pandemic, it's already clear that during the lockdowns of the spring in the US, Americans have been using libraries more than ever before, because even when library buildings are physically shuttered they've been using libraries' online portals, they've been borrowing electronic books and audiobooks, and using information about health, about voting, about financial crisis, curated by librarians.
"So I do think that libraries will absolutely survive if we think of them not as physical spaces that warehouse hunks of paper, but rather as civic institutions that make information available to all of us."
Libraries provide curation we can trust, Price says; "And in that sense libraries are the real outlier now."
