Are We Addicted to Books?

We live in a society where the value of the written word has steadily eroded in recent decades.  This erosion can be seen in a number of ways, starting with the rise of text messaging and instant messages as a form of communication in which shortening words is the norm, to the steady decline of basic formality.  Not only are most freshman college students incapable of spelling, but many have to be taught standard ways to address one’s elders in a letter (or an email to a professor).  Given such a decline, combined with the increased time that most of us spend in front of digital media (TV’s, computer’s video games…) one might think that the book- that indispensable, tome that has helped to shape our society, would be in decline as well, yet the contradictory is true.

Our society is one that has elevated literacy as a human good, and has, as a consequence of this elevated books.  We all have bookshelves filled with volumes of hard cover books, some of these we have read, but many (either given to us as a gift, or bought by us in a fit of passion and desire to change ourselves) will stand there for years collecting dust without having a broken spine; indeed, we often collect books as a sign of our intellectual prowess.  What amazes me is that in our world- where abbreviations are steadily replacing many words, we still value the spoken word as an “end in itself”, so much so that we judge developing countries on the literacy rate of their population.  The HDI (human development index), an annual report that rates countries from most, to least developed, looking at nations’ standards of living, mentions the issue of literacy as a key indicator of a States’ development.

Talking about the cost of books, this too has changed, from the days where all books were affordable, to today, where the cost of some books (almost anything printed 50 years ago or more) has shrunk virtually to $0, with e-books being freely available online, to the costs of others skyrocketing to a point where one is almost required to take out a second mortgage to afford a few textbooks (this may sound funny, but I kid you not, the cost of many accounting or business textbooks is upwards of $200, and students are required to purchase 4-5 of these books a semester!)

It is my hope that with the increased use of technology, e-books and other media, such as We Compare Books, book prices will again shrink as publishers realize the un-sustainability of such increases and figure out other ways to profit from our addiction to books (perhaps using product placement in examples, If Jimmy buys a bottle of Coke for $… and a bottle of Pepsi costs…, but here I am of course joking).