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03Aug2011
Reading under threat?

Posted by Jonathan Douglas

I’ve just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child”. It’s a great book, epic in its scale but very personal in the rich emotional life of its characters. I loved that moment of post-reading smug validation when a couple of days later it appeared on the Man Booker Prize longlist.

The Man Booker Prize frequently acts as a natural focus for concerns about reading in the UK. This year’s chair of judges, Dame Stella Rimington, has used the moment of the announcement of the longlist to assert the importance of the reading of fiction, which she says is under threat, particularly for young people. In an interview with the Telegraph she said:

“I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction.”

This is a frequently voiced concern, but is it a real one? Are children reading less fiction these days? Or did Harry Potter wave his wand and reverse a downward fiction reading trend?

The National Literacy Trust will soon publish new research that confirms Dame Stella’s concerns: between 2005 and 2011 the number of children who read fiction outside of the classroom has fallen from 51% to 46%. But these figures mask a much more alarming trend for boys’ reading. Over the same period the gap between number of boys and girls who read fiction has increased from 3% to 10%.

However the research suggests that children are not simply switching from print to digital, as Dame Stella suggests. Something more worrying is going on. The reading of almost all formats was down over the same period: websites fell from 63% to 49%, even emails fell from 53% to 50%

In fact, between 2005 and 2011 the number of children who read in any format every day went down from 38% to 29%, and the number of children who say they rarely or never read outside of class has gone up from 15% to 24%.

We are not seeing a migration from print to digital reading among young people, we are seeing reading falling in overall popularity as a leisure activity. We know that viewing video online is becoming more popular for all internet users than reading text. Reading itself is being squeezed.

How do we respond to this cultural trend and promote reading as relevant and irresistible?

The most important thing is to recognise that we are promoting reading, not one type of reading against another. In an age when the Man Booker Prize winner is likely to be read on a Kindle, to suggest that fiction reading is under threat from reading emails is like suggesting that the novel has been threatened for ages by the reading of letters. Approaches which promote all reading are needed. The technologies of reading are more dynamic than ever. The more we celebrate this energy, the more successful our promotion of reading will be.