Happy Friday Afternoon to you and brownie points to me for posting earlier than late Saturday night :)

I would like to comment on a post on Steve Wheeler's website "Learning with 'e's" from April 9th http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.il/2013/04/the-future-of-reading.html about the future of reading. Wheeler speaks about the beginning of projects whereby people can loan books digitally in England. The English are checking out such projects in smaller pilot schemes at the moment to see if such a project would be worthwhile. Mark Taylor, the head of The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professions" believes that such projects may result in a revolution in the reading behavior of the general public as they will have access to materials that they did not have access to previously.

I'm not sure how I feel about this post. On a personal level I grew up in a family without a television (until I left the house at eighteen when my parents invested in one- was I their source of entertainment beforehand and my leaving the house left an abyss that could not be filled? perhaps ;) and we would make weekly trips to the local library, with each member of the family taking out ten books a week. Yes, really. We would shlep home over seventy books a week and sometimes more depending on how many kids were at home that year. But we were, even back then, quite an anomaly. I believe that nowadays this would be considered even stranger behavior when attention spans are shorter, entertainment is more instant and less and less children are being brought up with the library as a part of their culture.

I do think that their are immeasurable advantages to growing up reading books- I know that my ability to skim material quickly was definitely influenced by my reading large amounts, my vocabulary (before I moved to Israel and found myself for quite a time with weak Hebrew and equally weak English ;) definitely grew on account of the huge amounts of reading I would do, etc, etc. On a separate note, as a bilingual I also believe that children and teenagers learning a second language should be encouraged to read as much as possible in their second language as I see for myself the advantages of such behaviors.

 I simply think that such projects as the ones mentioned in the post are not really addressing the root of the problem ( I feel like my social worker hat pops up every time I say that phrase). I am not persuaded that making books available for Kindle-owners is the answer to increasing reading tendencies in the general population. I don't see many teenagers with Kindles- I see far more older people using them. I think there have to be other attempts at encouraging the younger generation- be they monolingual or bilingual- to read. Any suggestions?