By Malena Sánchez Moccero
Translation: Guy Simpson

Who hasn't heard a grandmother or grandfather complain, with a mixture of concern and annoyance, that young people don't read any more? “We used to read all the time. Who does nowadays? No-one.” We are a bunch of uncultured illiterates. And it's not just the older folk who are saying this. So what basis is there for this nostalgic pessimism?
Reading rates are down. A survey carried out by the Argentine Government's Media Department revealed that 52% of Argentines failed to read a book in the whole of 2004, and 61,9% of the people who said they did, couldn't recall the name of a single author. Audio-visual media and the new technologies surround us. Inviting and seductive, they draw us ineluctably in. It feels strange to keep our hands still for so long, holding a book, stranger still for our eyes to move horizontally along paragraphs, page after page, without missing a single detail.
“One of the by-products of today's fragmentary culture is a need for simultaneity,” Ana Maria Andrada, director of the Blas Pascal Centre for Educational Technology, told MYRIADES 1. “No one watches a entire television program any more, no one does one thing at a time.” Andrada made the point that if people aren't doing several things at the same time – and this almost always includes some technological activity – they feel as if they are wasting their time.
And then there is so much else out there waiting to crowd our leisure time, points out Teresita Valderetto, editorial director of Aique Larousse. “I think that TV, cinema and all the heavily visual technologies are relegating reading to the back burner: there are simply so many alternatives on offer to fill the gaps in our free time.” Valdettaro, who also advises the Buenos Aires Governmental Education Department, believes that with such a wide variety of tempting options on hand, “literature is pushed into the background, where it remains associated with obligation: school.”

Are books on the way out?
Does the postmodernist panorama, with technology fanning out unchecked in all directions, present us with a vista in which the book is reduced to a relic? Is the dear friend, who delighted so many generations with its typed pages, about to die of old age?
Susana Itzcovich, literature professor, journalist and children's literature critic, disagrees. “The book isn't on the road to extinction because of technology: they simply coexist,” she maintains. President, also, of the Argentinian Children's Literature Association (ALIJA), Itzcovich adds: “The pleasure that comes from turning the pages of a stylish, well-produced book cannot be replaced by a computer.”
Children's author, Pablo de Santis, is another who decries the prophets of doom preaching the end of the book as we know it. “When I was born, everybody had a television at home and yet people went to the cinema more than they do today: different modalities can exist side by side, without one of them necessarily dieing out. Books have a distinct advantage when it comes to manual practicality; used by a trained reader, they have a extraordinarily rapid search capacity.” 

Changing ways of reading
Another age: around 4,000 BC. A man – a Sumerian or an Egyptian, opinions vary about the precise origin – scratches symbols in a clay tablet. It is an act of expression that will be taken up and developed by all the great ancient civilizations; signs and characters would be inscribed in whatever medium came to hand, clay, ivory (? Tr.), papyrus. Thus the book gradually took shape, until it assumed the form we know today: and where, it seems, its evolution continues.
“Today's children are living in a culture that is audiovisual and fragmentary; they see the world in a different way, have a different way of relating concepts, and so they have another conception of what writing and literature is”. Ana María Andrada, again. She adds, on a positive note: “I believe that children are interested in reading and writing. It's up to us to understand these new conceptions they have of the world”.
Internet is one of the main factors behind this reshaping of concepts. It was so that reading might come to children via the internet that María Fernanda Macimiani set up the educational and literary website Léeme un cuento (Read me a story). It is this children's writer and website designer's opinion that every time children “enter the virtual world, the doors to on-screen reading open”. “The sporty kid, the animal lover, the one who likes painting and drawing: they can all read about the subject in a CD-ROM or website, see photos and videos, exchange opinions with authors and with other children mad about the same things, ask for information, receive news updates; and in doing so, they have to read”. What's more, and Macimiani stresses the importance of this, “Children feel at home at their computers; they read free of the strain that so often accompanies book-reading when it is imposed by school.”
Internet is not only entertaining, it is a powerful tool for searching out information. Publisher Valdettaro considers that the Net has largely replaced books as an information source. “What people used to look up in an encyclopaedia, a dictionary, or an atlas, they now read directly off the Internet,” she says, while emphasizing how accessible the Web has made massive amounts of information.

The metamorphosis of the book
Publishers are seeking to respond to the changing ways of reading. Valdettaro explains, “At Aique Larousse, we were forced to become more visual.” Books changed to become “more complex, more interactive, more attractive; graphics and design now play a far greater role.” Macimiani sees these changes being reflected in school textbooks. “They are better adapted to the new generation of children. You only have to look at the design to see that interrelated themes are integrated and illustrated in such a way as to make reading a more stimulating, interactive and playful skill.”
Andrada speaks in a similar vein about efforts made by publishers around the world in the same direction. Changes have not been limited to graphics, either. “Books have been lifted out of their two-dimensional existence to the paper creations of a third dimension: books with drawers you can pull out, or suggesting projects for murals, or employing different materials...”
As an illustrative example of this, she cites a book about the ancient Egyptians which contains hieroglyphic stamps, a piece of genuine papyrus and ink. The reader selects his or her own glyphs, inks them up, and prints a personal design on the papyrus. “The child is learning about the Egyptians and making contact with their culture via a private act.”
 All well and good, but do these inventive publications remain a form of reading? Andrada insists that they are. “They require you to read in a different way, because knowledge is being truly put together; in addition they have a narrative that generally links multiple disciplines.”
Where pessimists see the decline of the book, Andrada sees opportunity. The very technology, she argues, that is responsible for modifying the way in which people address themselves to written texts, offers possibilities for modifying these same texts in positive response to the new reading habits. “Technology enriches reading matter,” she claims, and gives as an examples of this books that come with supportive software, or museum CDs that allow PC users to look at paintings as if they were taking a guided tour, without having to move from their seats. For Valdettaro, the new technology not only permits interaction with the image, it also means the use of new materials, faster production, lower costs, all of which facilitate the process that puts books into people's hands.

Is the flood of imagery harmful?
When an image is unrelated to anything outside itself, is just an image; when instead of letting words fire his or her imagination, a child just looks directly at pictures, isn't their capacity for thought limited? Will we end up turning into “Homo videns”, as described by Giovanni Sartori: human beings used only to viewing images, incapable of abstracting conceptions from a few carefully selected words?
Our interviewees were unanimous in their dissension from Sartori's gloomy prediction. Andrada doesn't  believe that  children's ability for abtract thought is lost in the welter of images and is seconded in this by 
Itzcovich: The predominance of images in books for the very young is a distinct advantage, because they learn another way of reading: that of the image itself.” Valdettaro sees no reason why images should be in competition with the written word. “In a school text book, for example, relating an event, and then adding a photograph, enriches the narrative. In this instance we are making didactic use of the image.” She is referring, of course, to its logical and balanced use. And Macimiani is equally unconcerned: “Once children take a liking  to reading, they start to seek out what appeals to them. They know that there is much to be discovered by reading and then design and graphics become secondary.”