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Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

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Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#371

Post by theshrike79 »

goblin89 wrote: post #329
coffeebeqn wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same - except many of my friends were reading for fun. Oh this has a skeleton on the cover? Guess I’ll read everything this guy/gal ever wrote. All the libraries I’ve been to recently are very well set up for discoverability. Especially the kids section. There are hundreds of books on display with some indication of what it’s like and themed sections and all kinds of stuff

Everyone seems to say children should go to libraries more. At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate. I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying…

> At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.

You know what isn't cheap in the 2020s? Space.

My grandparents had a full-ass room just for books. I can't even fit my modest blu-ray collection in my apartment, they sit in storage along with my DVDs and physical books.

I've got a Kindle and Calibre with hundreds of books and they don't take any space.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#372

Post by ffsm8 »

goblin89 wrote: post #329
coffeebeqn wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same - except many of my friends were reading for fun. Oh this has a skeleton on the cover? Guess I’ll read everything this guy/gal ever wrote. All the libraries I’ve been to recently are very well set up for discoverability. Especially the kids section. There are hundreds of books on display with some indication of what it’s like and themed sections and all kinds of stuff

Everyone seems to say children should go to libraries more. At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate. I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying…

I've become an avid reader of web novels when I found out about them as a teenager sometime before 2010. Idk, for me it completely removed the urge to get physical books. I've got a Kindle too at some point, but I felt the form factor was terrible for reading fiction. There is a reason why newspapers always put their publications into columns, because it makes for an extremely fast reading experience - which is great for fiction.

Another factor is that web fictions are targeted at people that just want to read for a short moment, so you're basically only gonna read for 5-10 minutes before the chapter is over and you're done until the next publication.

IMHO the biggest danger to the medium (written fiction) are LLMs. Since they've become well known, the amount of content has skyrocketed and most of it is without any point. No coherent story that develops with characters growing over the months/years you're following them.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#373

Post by lazyasciiart »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #351
calvinmorrison wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 mins x 7 periods so 2 hours of work after working from 7-3, some light sport or after school activity until 5. Home, dinner, and more work? Absurdity.

Yeah, and the worst part is that 15 minutes per class isn't enough to actually do any useful learning. It's just going to be two hours of pointless busy work.

I wouldn’t expect it to be 15 minutes from each class each night - more like a weekly assignment from each class that means each night you do 1 hour of one class, half an hour each of two others, rotating.

For many classes though, 15 minutes/night would be very useful. Language learning, for instance, or music practice. Most kids would benefit from 15 minutes of writing prose for any reason, and I think even high school math topics could provide 15 minutes of worthwhile practice questions each evening. All of these are things that you get better at with repeated practice.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#374

Post by pasc1878 »

sovnwnt wrote: post #326
lupire wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which books of the canon did you read that you found to be garbage prose?

I wouldn't say it's "garbage prose" but I read A Tale of Two Cities in school and found it impossible to form a mental image from the text in some parts. I'm still struggling to understand what "Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail." means.

Look at what happened in 2008 with banks collapsing - by having runs upon them. This is being done via postal withdrawals here.

This isn't obscure.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#375

Post by lazyasciiart »

Aerroon wrote: post #359
naasking wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just no time, but making even otherwise fun things mandatory with a volume that's overwhelming can suck the fun out of it and/or make it seem dull.

At one point I came to the realization that "reading is supposed to be fun". But it wasn't for me during school. At all. I hated every minute of it. It made me wonder if children in the future will be forced to watch movies and play video games in their "literary education" and whether they will hate watching movies and playing games because of that.

Funnily enough I recently came across an online discussion asking why people used to like khan academy, when today “everyone hates it”. The poster was about 15, from memory, and apparently it was standard practice in their experience to use khan academy within classes or as assigned homework.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#376

Post by theshrike79 »

raincole wrote: post #345
pie_flavor wrote: post #138

Anime is an extremely lucrative market, and Westerners spend an absurd amount of money on it, with Hollywood missing out. It's not because it's Japanese, or its weirder quirks, it's just because Japan is making it and Hollywood isn't, because Hollywood is institutionally incapable of believing people want (a) weird fantasy (b) that takes itself seriously (c) in quantity over quality, or even that adult media can be a…

I don't know. As an Asian who has grown up reading manga I find anime generally very cliche. More than Netflix shows. Especially those adaptations from light novels. I think it is just about what's novel to you.

It's the variance in plots in Manga/Anime that's the thing.

Some of my very favourite anime have been about:

  - Kid learning Go (the board game) from the ghost of an ancient grandmaster (Hikaru No Go)
  - Baking bread (Yakitate!! Japan)
  - Playing Tennis (Prince of Tennis)
There is exactly zero chance that "Hollywood" would make any of these.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#377

Post by DavidPiper »

janalsncm wrote: post #56

> Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok. “BookTok is imperfect,” said Karen Jensen, a youth librarian and a blogger for School Library Journal, “but in teen publishing it’s generating huge bestsellers, bringing back th…

This whole thread - and that whole chunk of TFA - is totally alien to me.

When I was 9, our school had a small library with a librarian (or at least an on-duty teacher), and if you wanted to read something you could always go and ask her what she thought you'd enjoy - and that was on the off chance you couldn't find something that looked appealing.

There are also public libraries where you could do the same thing with your parents in tow.

When did that stop?

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#378

Post by theshrike79 »

lmm wrote: post #281
kderbyma wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like committees....animes tend to have a visionary person who writes the core story and characters..... Hollywood is filled with board rooms of groups who are all incentivized in a way to 'get buy in' through concessions.... the first concession is the art...the vision.... then the talent.... then it's all down hill from there

> Sounds like committees....animes tend to have a visionary person who writes the core story and characters..... Funny, I've heard the exact opposite complaint a lot, that every anime in the last 20 years is made by committee and that's why the vast majority of anime are just slavish adaptations of already-successful manga, and even the few original anime projects that happen tend to be retreads of genre cliches.

"Last 20 years" is a pretty sweeping statement.

Like there are no auteur anime since 2004?

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#379

Post by theshrike79 »

animal531 wrote: post #3

I think the big problem with reading is that it's much slower compared to other media. Add in the fact that you can also only read for so long before your eyes get tired and then people just naturally veer away from it.

You really think that a 40 minute rambling video on how to set up, say, Docker and a piece of software on it is slower than the exact same content written with images?

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#380

Post by theshrike79 »

janalsncm wrote: post #60
inasio wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the opposite way, at least from the point of view of absorbing information. I often have a hard time with podcasts and often youtube videos because I feel I could have read the info there in a few minutes vs watching/listening to something for much longer

We live in an attention economy but the content that demands our attention is increasingly low value. Often the vast majority of podcast content and YouTube video content could be simplified to maybe 10% of what is there. I have unfortunately seen this in some of the nonfiction books I read as well, which tend to spend way too much time on filler and fluff than actually advancing the main points. This wastes my time…

Kagi's summariser has been a life-saver for me. I can just feed any Youtube URL to it and it gives me bullet points about the content.

Then I can decide if I know enough or whether I want to listen to the full video.

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