Welcome

Hello, and welcome to my blog experiment, The Death Of Reading.

Reading has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I learnt at a very young age, and I would often be tasked with reading to the other children at pre-school when the carers got lazy. Rarely have I not had a book on the go, sitting by the side of my bed ready to be picked up and perused. Fiction, nonfiction, comics and manga, I enjoy it all. But am I part of a dying breed?

Anaylists have been decrying the end of reading for years, but never have their words seemed more relevant than today. Sure, 99% of the population of the UK can read, but do they use it for much more than flicking through the TV guide or checking their Facebook page?

To sit down and enjoy a good book, a person has to focus, concentrate and engage their imagination, and many are simply too tired to do this after a long day at work. And are they in the wrong for this? Television is visual, noisy and easy to absorb. Similarly, the internet offers endless amounts of bite-sized entertainment for those with short attention spans or limited time to spare.

To begin with, I went out into Canterbury high street, and asked some random passers-by how much they read. The answers I got varied from every day, to not at all:



The sheer amount of alternative forms of entertainment means that it is simply a fact that people read less then in decades past. This is unavoidable, and having more choice is not really a bad thing. However, reading for pleasure is, in my opinion, one of the most rewarding things one can do in life. It is both entertaining and helps people grow, both intellectually and emotionally. If reading really is becoming neglected by the majority of people today, then it is truly a shame, and one I would like to understand the reasons behind.

That is the goal of this website: to investigate the various reasons why people do not read as much as they used to. I hope you enjoy the site as much as I did making it.