Donald Lamm Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by L. Carper

Page 9 of 10

The Will to Read

There's another problem that's out there. You mention it in your writings and I think you also mention it in your lectures on campus, and you refer to it as not a problem of the ability to read, but the will to read. Are publishers and booksellers discovering a declining market because people don't want to read books any more?

If you really want my horror scenario it is this, it is the five-year-old child who, on being given a book, slams it down, marches out of the room, goes to a computer, turns the computer on and says "Don't ever show me another one of those things." It really starts young, Harry, and that is really, I think, all publishers' deepest worry. Are we developing generations of young people who think that reading books is the equivalent of taking cough medicine?

But you're something of an optimist in this regard, aren't you? And if that's true, why do you think books will last?

Well, the very definition of any publisher who has stayed in the business as long as I have is that he must be an optimist. But I think it is more than some romantic notion that the book will go on and on forever. I really, deeply believe that a) the book has never been the central instrument of popular culture -- it can be displaced very easily by other things; but, b) when it comes to the transmission of culture, nothing has lasted as long and nothing has done it so well.

Next page: Conclusion

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