Reading For Pleasure

The Waterstone's parent company HMV released strong figures today, but in amongst them was the news that Waterstone's like-for-like sales are down 3.8%.

Music and video games sales were up, HMV having benefited from the collapse of Zavvi and Woolies (incidentally, isn't that 'wither'?).

Chief executive Simon Fox said on the Today programme this morning that the decline in book sales was partly due to a collapse of 20% (I think) in travel titles - people not having the cash to take as many foreign holidays. He forecast a good year ahead, with some big titles on the horizon. (He didn't mention any of ours, but this was probably an oversight.)

While 3.8% isn't good news, it could be worse, I'm sure. Speaking as someone who lost cash and stock when the Zavvi wholesaler EUK went under, we need a strong and profitable Waterstone's.

I do wonder if we'll be a nation of readers in the next 30 years or so, though.

This recent post by the used-to-be-left-wing-now-right-wing blogger Laban Tall caught my eye at the weekend.

It concerns A level history students who were dumbfounded by an exam question which asked, 'How far do you agree that Hitler’s role 1933-45 was one of despotic tyranny?'

That's the sort of exam question I used to love, in that there is no right answer; this allows weak but quick-writing students like me to spray the page with lots of half-remembered almost-facts, some of which will stick and earn you a B. (You can't do this in physics.)

However, it does rely on you being able to understand the words 'despotic' and 'tyranny', and therein lay the problem for a number of entrants.

They didn't know what the question was asking, and are now up in arms about it. (A Facebook page called Despotic Tyranny Ruined My Life currently has more than 1,500 members. Given the millions of lives which really have been ruined by despotic tyrants over the centuries, I imagine it started out as a piece of irony. But if you read some of the comments on Facebook - not least the genuinely foul and threatening abuse directed at the students - it gets quite depressing.)

I'll leave it to Laban and others to decide what this all means for literacy and the education system generally (it's not exactly a scientific sample, and there must have been plenty of kids who had no problem at all - and probably wondered if 'despotic tyranny' wasn't, in fact, tautologous).

But most of my own vocab, such as it is, came not from school but from books, and so I do think - unscientifically, and taken with the explosion in video games - that it probably reflects a decline in reading for pleasure.

When I were a lad, by the way, when we weren't reading we were outside playing sport. After Saturday's Lions defeat, I'd be interested to see what the video game sales are in South Africa, Australia and NZ.

Posted by Dan