"Just How Much Do People Really Read?" Again

I have long had the impression that there is a tendency to underestimate the effect that "the digital age" has had on reading, and especially on certain kinds of reading--fully attentive, word-for-word reading rather than skimming; long-form reading; and the reading of fiction, particularly where this means routine, copious fiction reading for pleasure.

The result is that when reading the New Yorker piece about "The End of the English Major" the remarks of Columbia Professor of English James Shapiro caught my eye. The figure in question--a professor of English, and at that, not some adjunct baited and switched into a life of endless grading of mind-destroying student papers for minimum wage whose reading anything else might be thought suspect by employer and students alike, but a full professor at an Ivy League institution with all the privileges of that position--confessed that where he had typically read "five novels a month" down into the earlier years of this century if he "read[s] one a month now, it's a lot."

Think about that--even someone who has devoted his life to the teaching and study of literature, in circumstances about as good as are offered to any academic, admitted on the record that during this century his novel-reading has collapsed perhaps eighty percent or more.

He was also quite clear on the causes, acknowledging that this was "not because I've lost interest in fiction. It's because I'm reading a hundred Web sites. I'm listening to podcasts."

So are just about all of us in some degree. And it would be better if we started to admit the situation--especially those of us at all concerned with such issues as the publishing industry, the working conditions of and compensation for writers, the humanities in society, and what may be the consequences of declining literacy, rather than continuing with the quite stupid "Oh, people read as much as ever they did!" charade in which so many persist explicitly or implicitly (as when they, for example, look at the way the Young Adult fiction boom went bust).