The Death of Reading Literature

Is Reading books becoming a thing of the past? My mother had awoken that curiosity and imagination in me at a very young age. There were so many stories, lessons and illustrations that my young mind fell in love with .
That love still hasn’t faded away. Each year I pressurize myself to read more than preceding years. I always have this obligation to keep myself discovering new literature, entering unchartered territories instead of taking shelter in books I already know and love. But recently I’ve been questioning my own aims.

In 2013, I read around seventy-five books out of which fifty were hard copies while the rest were digital. In 2017 i.e. last year, I just read twenty-four books out of which fourteen were hard copies and ten were digital. There has been a rapid downfall in my reading habits but that’s just not my case but the case of entire generation.

When I look around, all I can see is most people are glued to their mobile phones either surfing web, watching YouTube Videos or instagramming etc. No surprise at all that reading for pleasure is in a state of decline.

According to US government studies, since 1984, the percent of 13-year-olds who are weekly readers went down from 70% to 53%, and the percent of 17-year-olds who are weekly readers went from 64% to 40%. The percentage of 17-year-olds who never or hardly ever read tripled during the period, from 9% to 27%.

Is Technology to be at blamed?

Digital technologies are at times displacing and replacing our reading. But we are in the time of adaptions. We can’t just forget about internet. The responsibility falls upon us to learn how to use digital technologies with excellence.

The online self-publishing market has grown a lot in these few years as budding authors can now easily upload their works on platforms like Scribd, Wattpad, Smashwords and Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. I myself, have read over 110 books in Wattpad and it’s easily accessible for the new-bies to publish their book.

So what should we do in order to cultivate reading habits in children?
Scholastics surveyed the parents of children between the ages of zero and five for the first time this year in an attempt to discover what made children frequent readers. The report found that a six to 11-year-old child is more likely to be a frequent reader if they are currently read aloud to at home, if they were also read aloud to five to seven days a week before starting nursery, and if they are less likely to use a computer for fun.
So there in lies the answer why kids aren’t reading books now-a-days….