Far from contradicting those who speak of the decline of reading, the vast quantities of new titles available today, with print-runs stretching into the millions, seem rather to confirm them in their conviction. For one thing, compared to the growth in the global population of potential book-readers, the expansion of industrial book-production is almost insignificant. Moreover, so the argument runs, this is not merely a quantitative matter. Within the configuration of the contemporary life-world, books occupy a less and less determinant position; the other mass media have irreversibly displaced them as social institutions for the creation and moulding of public opinion. In short, according to this line of thinking, reading is increasingly a thing of the past, and with it the type of civilization that has revolved around it.
There is no shortage of evidence for such views. For example, books have been expelled from politics; in order to participate in it, one no longer needs to be ‘well read’—on the contrary, that would constitute an obstacle, a defect to be compensated for by other mediatic virtues. The figure of the politician-ideologue belongs very much to the past. In other spheres, emotional release no longer occurs while reading romance novels, but in front of the tv or cinema screen; scientific information reaches a general audience much more effectively through television programmes than through popularizations in book form; even a large portion of poetic production seems to have returned to its old imbrication with music. Everything would seem to indicate that while people will of course continue to read, it will be as a merely secondary procedure, an occasional accompaniment to other mediums for communication.
Nevertheless, it is worth asking: when we speak of the decline of books and reading, what is it that we are actually lamenting? Is it merely the narrowing of reading’s field of relevance, its loss of social importance as the means for consciousness to gain access to the world? I think not. What we are lamenting is something perhaps harder to grasp than that, but more radical: the possible extinction of an entire species—Homo legens, the human who reads.