Earlier today I  found myself thinking about why we refer to books as an old technology and therefore lacking in their capacity to attract younger, hipper, tech-savvy readers.

Art galleries, theater productions, orchestra concerts...all of these are old art forms that still appeal to wide masses today. Although many aspects of how they are created and presented to the public have been jazzed up to fit with the style and preferences of culture today, art shows, concerts, and plays still manage to attract an audience. Even those who aren't huge fans or experts in the respective fields these art forms represent attend and enjoy public shows. We don't claim that art is ineffective today just because it is created with the same old paints and on the same old canvases that have been used for centuries.

Why is that?

I think one answer might be the magnitude and capacity for interaction with these shows. What if libraries became book meccas? What if libraries were places that had books and quiet spaces to read, but also focused on reading groups, cross-media engagement with texts, hosting public readings, offering writing workshops, and idea sharing.

I wonder (and this is a big 'I wonder,' as I may be totally off base) what would happen to libraries if they transformed into places it was an event to go to. Libraries could intermingle performance (public readings and open mic nights) with history (having visuals to walk through the process of making a book/how books came to look like books), practice (writing workshops and reading groups), with intake (quiet spaces stuffed with books for reading and meditating, and rooms with music and movies and art already labeled and connected to specific books).

I imagine this would be an incredibly unfeasible task. There are many flaws with this idea. But I also imagine that such a library would be a beautiful place to be. I think we should make a bigger deal out of reading than we do. Too often, I think, we grow complacent in the knowledge that books are all around us; we make assumptions that books are always the same, will always be the same, and that the main point of learning to read is to become capable at life basics (such as reading the how-to guide for one's new 60" plasma screen TV) and well-studied in other academic areas.

What would happen to reading if we had sustained, well-publicized access to dynamic reading events?