Personally, I tend to believe that immersive reading is mostly about leisure-time entertainment activity. Reading for meaning typically involves breaks, for thinking or consulting other sources or writing something down. So I believe that they are two different kinds of activities.

The reference to Mailer’s comment is interesting. It’s not about reading, per se; instead, he’s commenting on the frequent interruption for commercials, and claiming that those interruptions destroys the narrative stream of the program. I’m not sure that’s true of TV; I think kids learn pretty early on to mentally “pause” the program for commercials, and pick up the narrative thread (such as it may be) when the program resumes.

But there’s another problem which I think may be serious, and that’s the one touched on in the NEA report. Immersive reading, even of fiction, is practice; it trains one in the mechanics of reading, of how words are spelled, how phrases are assembled. Without this practice, reading for meaning, and writing for communication, may be harder.

Until we have definitive studies to test this hypothesis, we can’t say anything beyond stating a personal belief – David’s view is as much of a belief as mine. The study mentioned by David Rothman was not intended to resolve this hypothesis, and does not do so.

On a related topic, I’ve observed that historically only a small percentage of the populace have immersively read as a habit, and I believe it is related to basic personality and interests which are essentially hard-wired at birth and/or very early in life. “Education”, “cajoling” and even “forced reading” will not make the majority of people want to immersively read. A person develops the habit of immersive reading because it is in some way addictively pleasurable to them, and I believe for the majority of people it will never be pleasurable in an addictive way no matter how much they do it out of necessity or interest-at-the-moment, and what they immersively read.

Even if they read something that they greatly enjoy at the time they read it, it does not necessarily lead to developing the habit. Some will, most won’t. (A corollary of what David is saying is that everyone will develop the immersive reading habit provided they are introduced to it in a positive way, and with this I greatly disagree – what we can say for certain is that we just don’t know.)

Now one might argue that with today’s fast-paced world where we obtain lots of information in tiny tidbits, that those who would develop the immersive reading habit given the opportunity, will not do so. I reject this since one can and will immersively read from a lot of content found on the Web, and so there’s enough opportunity for those people to get “hooked” and continue to seek out more immersive reading material to feed their habit.

And finally we come back full circle as to whether the immersive type of reading, which David believes is critical, is really that important. Again, we do not yet have the definitive, scientific answer, and I’m not sure it is an answerable question.

(It would be an interesting study to test the hypothesis that people are now reading more than they were before the Internet became ubiquitous. I believe people are reading more, and I think more people believe this to be good, regardless as to what they are reading, and how.)

Fortunately, from the commercial publisher’s viewpoint, there will always be a market for immersive-type content, primarily fiction. Even if only 10% of the general public immersively reads as a habit, that means over 30 million readers in the U.S., which is still a huge, multibillion dollar market. And even those who don’t have the immersive reading addiction will buy the occasional book because the topic is very important to them at the moment – they read for the information, not because of habit, and I believe we have to differentiate between the two.

(I personally know a few people who are immersive reading addicts, and they themselves would agree that they are “book addicts.” If one is to become addicted to something, books is one of the few positive addictions to have.)