Do you have books in your house? If not, the MUS library will be open Wednesdays from 10 to 2 this summer

I also was lucky enough to live across the street from my parents’ college and have access to the children’s reading room, set up for teachers in training, and filled with books for all ages.  My friend Debra and I spent one summer, when we were 9 or 10, riding our bikes to that library every day and reading right there in that room—no need to check anything out!  We had a good public library in town and we used it too, but the college library was right there and the reading room was a little hideaway we had all to ourselves.

When I try to imagine a world without physical books, where everything is digital and electronic, I always wonder how our kids would be exposed to the stories?  Would they choose to pick up an e-reader and scroll up and down on a tiny screen, or would they just default to the video game and television set sitting right in front of them?  How would they be aware that the books exist?  I know they say that a person’s educational success can be predicted by the number of books in their parents’ house,* so what would happen to the kids’ intellects if there were no physical books to look at?  That’s one of many reasons I think the physical book will never go away, although e-books are fine for some purposes.

Wal-Mart is said to have a display system called “Actionality” where likely impulse purchases are put right out in front of the consumers in order to attract their attention and sell more items, whether they were intending to get those things or not.  Books need to be out in front of kids, where they can see them, pick them up, and flip through them.  Else they will probably never know that a lot of these books ever existed.

*“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports [a] study in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books."