BOOK LUST

This essential reading by Timothy Egan writing in The New York Times.

Every now and then, someone who is brilliant says something stupid — often the result of spending too much time riding a jet stream of high praise. Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Inc., did such a thing last month when he all but declared the death of reading.
Asked about Kindle, the electronic book reader from Amazon.com, Jobs was dismissive. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” he told John Markoff of The Times, “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

This is nonsense on several levels. But before we get to reading, let’s stipulate that Jobs is deserving of his 2007 ranking by Fortune Magazine as the most powerful person in business. Anyone who can cause revolutions in five industries, as Fortune noted, is a titan — capable of touching a billion lives.

His life story is inspiring. An adopted child, he drops out of Reed College in Portland, Ore., but remembers the calligraphy classes when he designs the typography for the Macintosh. Gets rich. Gets fired. Gets cancer. Survives all three. Takes acid, wanders around India, dates exotic older women. Marries. Has kids. Loves the Beatles, and cites their creative tension as a business model. Gives great commencement speech at Stanford, concluding: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.
Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.
For most of my lifetime, I’ve heard that reading is dead. In that time, disco has died, drive-in movies have nearly died, and something called The Clapper has come and gone through bedrooms across the nation.

But reading? This year, about 400 million books will be sold in the United States. Overall, business is up 1 percent — not bad, in a rough economy, for a $15 billion industry still populated by people whose idea of how to sell books dates to Bartleby the Scrivener.
Next year, business may be down, and several publishers may merge, and certainly more of the poor, beloved independent bookstores will cling to life support.

Steve Jobs will stroll into a room filled with breathless acolytes and pull a must-have trick from his bag. We’ll oohh and ahhhh about it, then go back to lives where a good book still holds more power than anything with a screen. Power to transport the reader to another world. Power to get inside somebody’s else mind, to live their story, to be moved.

Yes, the act of reading takes some effort, unlike the passive act of using the products Jobs has created, which involves little more than directing eyeballs to a flat patch or putting a plug into the ear. True, reading is down, somewhat, from 1992, especially reading of literature. So what? People are eating fewer vegetables than they used to – or should – but that doesn’t mean carrots have no future.

When Jobs cited the 40-percent-who-don’t-read figure, he was no doubt referring to a hand-wringing and possibly erroneous 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts. “This report documents a national crisis,” the chairman, Dana Gioia, said at the time. Message from the cultural elite: read, you morons, and eat your spinach while you’re at it!
Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. Steve Jobs may be many things – maestro, visionary, demi-god – but he apparently isn’t a careful reader of certain market reports.

The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.

Most companies would kill for a market like that – more than one-fourth of the world’s biggest consumer market buying 15 or more of its items a year. And half the population bought nearly 6 books a year. If only Apple were so lucky.

The latest Harry Potter book sold 9 million copies in its first 24 hours – in English. “The DaVinci Code,” a story of ideas even with its wooden characters and absurd plotting, has sold more than 60 million copies.

By contrast, Apple reported selling a piddling 3.7 million of the much-hyped iPhones through 2007. Is the iPhone dead? Of course not. But what should be dead are foolish statements about how human nature itself has changed because of some new diversion for our thumbs.
Jobs was prompted by the excitement over Kindle, the $399 electronic book reader that shows signs of being a blockbuster for Amazon.com; demand is much higher than supply, according to the company.

Paper or plastic, it doesn’t matter what form the book takes. What is timeless, Steve, is story, and that’s why people will never stop reading. I loved Sara Rimer’s piece in The Times about how immigrant children were taking to “The Great Gatsby,” the perfect novel about the tragic side of the American Dream.

Our teenage son put his text-messaging aside when he discovered “Friday Night Lights,” by H.G. Bissinger, and “Hate Mail from Cheerleaders,” a collection of Rick Reilly’s spot-on sports columns. Those were his gateway drugs. He’s moved on to the Tobias Wolff memoir, “This Boy’s Life,” and “Seabiscuit,” by Laura Hillenbrand. He even sets aside his iPod when he reads.

I look forward to a first-rate biography of Steve Jobs, an American original. His life – what a story! I’d read about it any day, in any form, long after the iStuff is forgotten.