Books a thing of the past?

While most of us are desperately avoiding the painful thought that summer is eventually going to end, the major commercial publishing houses are anxiously awaiting the fall season.

To put it mildly, the past year has been rather unforgiving to the world of literature. Blame it on the current state of the economy or a rapid increase in the popularity of digital media, but the fact is people just aren’t buying as many books as they used to.

And now, as seems to be the case in every industry, people in the book business fear a substantial loss of jobs.

However, according to Leon Neyfakh’s recent article in The New York Observer, the coming season marks the release of a promising crop of sure-to-be bestsellers.

Titles by cash-cow authors like Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, Barbara Kingsolver and a slew of other notable writers are slated to appear in stores between September and November.

Of course, some people are skeptical as to whether a few big-name releases are really going to be enough to immediately redeem the book industry to the former glory of past decades. I tend to agree.

Why is it that people aren’t reading as many books? Is it the advent of the film or video game industry? I don’t think so. These industries have been around for awhile, and both are dealing with similar slumps in sales.

Reading a book is an entirely different experience.

Books engage the mind and allow you to create the scenes in your own imagination, as opposed to these other less subtle forms of entertainment, which teach you how to recline comfortably in your armchair and, well, passively observe someone else’s creation.

To a lot of people, that sounds ideal. But in terms of actual learning, these types of activities are going to put us in line with becoming a future third-world country with the mental capacity of a stale bag of Doritos.

What is it going to take before the publishing industry starts paying attention to the demands of its market? The industry needs to find a way to make reading more accessible to an audience.

For a lot of people, being in a bookstore is like taking a walk through a history museum: It’s all very interesting, but at the same time, the place reeks of antiquity and impracticality.

Schools, I fear, have done nothing to improve the popularity of literature. Books are assigned en masse as homework, so at an early age, students associate black and white pages with the laborious task of memorizing vocabulary and writing lengthy reports, activities which seem dull in comparison with the digital realm.

And those posters that hang throughout the libraries of elementary schools are about as lame an attempt at promotion as the milk advertisements you find in school cafeterias. “Shaquille O’Neal READS,” they proclaim, showing the athlete leaning against a fake bookshelf, holding a book and smiling awkwardly as if posing for a yearbook photo.

If publishers and bookstore owners want to revive their diminishing industry, maybe they should work on updating their products as well as their marketing techniques.

The “Kindle,” Amazon’s popular digital reader, might be a start, but if we’re going electronic, can’t you at least spare me a little color on the pages? If we really wanted to improve readership, maybe we should convince our teachers to start assigning television and video games as homework.