Does anybody read anymore?

I've worked in a library for nearly 25 years, and it seems to me as if we're becoming more and more what Don Borchert, author of "Free-For-All: Oddballs, Geeks and Gangstas in the Public Library" calls a "tax supported Blockbuster". People just aren't checking out books anymore or reading. They're stocking up on DVD's by the armload. I've seen whole families take home something like 30 DVD's between all of them and I have to wonder to myself: how many movies a day can you watch before you just get saturated? I know that I can only watch a maximum of maybe two movies in one day before I've just had enough. I prefer to curl up and read a book and let the mind movies begin. It takes a real stretch of imagination to take yourself to the place where the book takes place, to see the characters in your mind's eye, to hear their voices speaking the dialogues and to forget where you are and what you're doing and to put yourself in another time and place. It's the perfect escape from the hurly-burly of our often too fast moving world, to slow down and pick up a good book and to read, even if it's non-fiction instead of a novel. I like reading non-fiction almost as much as a good fiction book. I love a good biography of some historical character that I would like to have gotten to know. I've met some fascinating characters in my lifetime by reading their biographies and one gains a lot of valuable insight into the people who made enough of a difference to have a biography written about them.

The problem is that so few people read anymore that the library where I work discards books that are only a year or so old, and more books than you can imagine. It sickens me to see cartloads of books being thrown away day after day after day because they do not circulate. If I had a huge house, I'd take them all home and read them, but I live in a tiny apartment with almost no free room left because of how many books I already own. What also maddens me is what is being thrown away. The librarian who weeds our non-fiction collection does so several times a year, which I think is a bit too much and unnecessary, given that we're not replacing what's being tossed. He tends to gut whole sections of non-fiction and leave huge holes in subject categories that never get replaced. Sure, we have limited room in our shelving ranges, but still, our shelves have begun to look mighty empty of late since he's on yet another weeding rampage because frankly, I think he gets bored and has nothing better to do with his time than to gut our non-fiction section.

The other librarians in charge of other sections like audio books, fiction, paperbacks and adult fiction don't weed nearly as much and as often and at least they ask us what we need and ought to keep before tossing things. The librarian in charge of non-fiction just goes gutting out whole sections and tosses brand new books if they don't circulate, but nobody on our staff does a good job of marketing our non-fiction and getting people to check it out. But then, we don't do a very good job of trying to get people to read in the first place. What we ought to do is if they want to see a film that started its life as a book, to encourage them to read it as well as see the movie. Of course, that requires concentration and time, and a lot of folks anymore will tell you that they just can't concentrate long enough to read and besides, they don't have time do anyway. It's enough to make me wonder if we're breeding an entire culture of attention deficit plagued people who can't learn how to sit and concentrate on reading and who want their stories told to them visually through film. Now, I like a good movie as much as the next person, but not to the exclusivity of any other medium.

So I wonder: are those of us who are die-hard readers becoming a dying breed? Are books and other print media destined for the dust-bin? Are people so addicted to their gizmos and gadgets that the days of reading a newspaper, magazine or a book about to vanish in my lifetime? Can you really curl up in bed with an e-reader or a computer or a Blackberry? Remember, those things need to be electrically charged, whereas a book, magazine or newspaper does not. In these energy conscious times, does it make any sense to be completely addicted to electronic gadgets that require energy to power them? It's really enough to make me wonder what's to become of the old-fashioned print media that I so love. Curling up in the mornings with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, or curling up in the afternoons and evenings with a magazine or a book and a cup of tea are some of my greatest pleasures. Having these things disappear would, to me, be the greatest tragedy. I just hope that such a thing never comes to pass, but seeing the way libraries are gutting their book collections and beefing up their audio-visual collections seems to me a sign of the times in which we live. And I'm not so sure that this was the future that I signed up for. I love gadgets as much as the next person, but I also love the tactile experience of holding a book, newspaper or magazine and reading it. I just can't imagine curling up with some kind of electronic gadget and using that to read in place of my beloved books. Just call me an old fashioned Luddite where it comes to print media.