Essay – Book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays
Book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays Essay: Books: considered as the best friend of man is seemingly at the death bed. While intellect is on rise with days, the medium to record those and sharing of thoughts has changed in this 21st Century. Words are increasing, dictionaries are becoming bulkier, but the writings are not necessarily found in the written medium that has been there since ages. While the first printed book was done in China in the 9th Century called Diamond Sutra containing sacred Buddhist texts, the first mass produced book was the Gutenberg’s Bible. The Bible is till now the most printed book in the world. With so many prints happening each year, why are we saying that book reading is reducing day by day?
Books, and by that I mean physical hard copies have a different feel altogether in terms of deep, sustained engagement with an idea or story. Reading books is both a skill and a habit. New readers feel more lethargic towards reading, but if they manage to continue with the practice, reading becomes a habit. The person feels more and more intrigued and habituated to books and feels like reading about new things and explore more. But according to current trends as seen in the United States of America, book reading has reduced by about 17% than the levels seen in the 1990s. The reason is mostly attributed to the rise of various forms of media. Though traditional news media through television and radio was popular at that time, people mostly from upper and upper middle classes were able to afford the best of those. Even then, these medium offered quite less than what people got from magazines and books, and these also became sorts of memoirs and collections for those who could afford the books on their own. Libraries were seen running on full fledge with people issuing books from all genre, and even came for magazines having information regarding jobs and opportunities.
Keeping aside the books issued for school curriculum, India has also seen reduction of book readers. With the advent of 2000s and beyond, computers and mobiles became more common in households, and so did social media with time. This has become a bane for books and their survival in this competitive world. In the world of TikTok and Instagram reels, a thirty second to one minute video is more of an attention grabber than a book of hundred pages which might take a day or two for a newbie to complete reading. Facebook and blog websites became excellent sites to share anecdotes and important life lessons. Magazines became digital with added footages of favourite stars. E-books are more common than hard copies since they take no extra storage in one’s home.
So the debate continues: is book reading indeed dying or has people changed medium of information gathering? And the answer is that gathering information online is not equivalent to the way a person holds a book in his hands, goes in his own world undistracted from the happenings of the present. He does not feel like scrolling through social media every two minutes. He has more concentration and patience. He processes the information given in the book in his hands without extra external feeding of ideologies. He can have his own thoughts, may be different from the other readers. Also, he is not in the continuous cycle of justifying his thoughts and getting shame on social media. Thus, traditional way of book reading becomes imperative even in this world of information overload.
Book reading as a practice has momentarily revived during the CoViD-19 Pandemic that shook the world. People were idle in their homes and after a few days and months of binge watching videos, turned towards books. Self-help books topped the selling lists. With the world opening up again, we as a society need to promote traditional ways of reading for our betterment. Promoting book clubs, introducing weekly discussions in schools where students share their thoughts on a selected book become excellent ways to revive the process. New learners should take it slow by starting off with short stories and eventually making way to genres they are most interested about.