Remaking Reading: A Response to the NEA's Call for Conversation

I was asked to write a response to the new NEA report To Read or Not to Read for the Chronicle of Higher Education; my piece “How Reading is Being Reimagined” is now online (subscription required) and will be out in the print edition next week.

Here’s a short bit:

[C]learly the report comes to us at a moment when reading and conversations about reading are in a state of flux. It’s worth taking a moment to account for this broader context. High-profile projects like Google’s and new devices like Kindle suggest what I call the remaking of reading, meaning that reading is being both reimagined and re-engineered, made over creatively as well as technologically.

The NEA asks for a serious national conversation about reading, and I see this as my own small contribution. It has nothing to do with refuting or debunking the NEA’s data, which generally seems more careful and less hysterical than the earlier Reading at Risk report; but I do think the context for the discussion needs to be widened, and that’s what I try to do here. The NEA’s findings are an essential starting point, but the conversation is too important to all of us to begin and end there.