The Future of Reading

Two recent items from the newest issue of the Christian Century caught my eye.

The first is entitled "Readers Wanted" and reports that a librarian at the University of Denver says that 47% of the books acquired from 2000-2009 where never checked out. The University of Arizona says they spent $19 million on books over the last decade that have never been used. Both libraries are going to be implementing a new system in which new books will be rented as e-books upon request, and then after demand is shown they may be purchased for the libraries collection.

After writing so much about having to make changes to keep up with changing technology, I can't really say that I am necessarily opposed to this, but I do have some concerns. The first is that, while almost half of the books weren't checked out, more than half were. What is also unknown is how these numbers compare to prior decades. Has there been a real change, or just a perceived one. I certainly know that a lot of research is done on the web today, but does that mean that the books are not needed? Also just because the books are not checked out does not mean they are not used. Which leads me into my second concern.

As someone who studies church history, I am often checking out books that have not been checked out in decades. When I was working on my thesis I would often be the first person checking a book out in the past 75 years, and one of them the library has had for 120 years and I was only the third to check it out. That of course does not mean that others didn't use it in the library, but I was certainly glad the library had it because it would not have been available to me otherwise. I also used Google books, and would not have been able to complete my thesis without them. If you haven't gone tried them you should. Again I was able to gain access to old texts that it would have taken me months to acquire through inter-library loans. Many of the books I used were digitized by libraries out of their collections in order to be more freely available to people who needed them, as well as to preserve them for future generations to use.

We are embarking on a significant change to how books and information are gathered and retained, but I'm not quite ready to say that the way that libraries operate at the moment has fundamentally changed. Even when I was getting books electronically, I was still printing them to read. I have looked at e-book readers and know people who love them, but I'm not quite there yet. Although having a book electronically in order to search them has been a God send on many occasions (again try Google books for this), but I have still gone back to the hard-copy to read the text.

Libraries, to me at least, still serve as the repository for information and they simply must have books that have little interest to most people, because no one else will carry them. If libraries start only being concerned with making sure all their books are popular, then we are in trouble. Most of the books I read cannot be found in normal bookstores, but are often available in libraries. Libraries do need to be concerned about shelving space, and digital books will make a significant difference for this, but when I want to pick up a book on the religious life of American youth I either have to buy it, or check it out of the library. Now there is certainly not much demand for this type of book, but does that mean the library shouldn't have it even if no one checks it out for several years? And if libraries aren't purchasing these books will publishers even publish them anymore?

Which leads into the second blurb entitled "Slow Reading." Apparently there is now a movement encouraging people to slow down their reading by employing two different strategies. The first is to have people read out-loud and the second is to focus on memorization, both of which force people to slow down and focus on the words. Lindsay Waters, an editor for Harvard University Press, said "Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don't even muss our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, and allow ourselves to enter the experience of words."

I guess the end gist of this is to go ahead and download that book to your i-pad or kindle, but then read it out loud.