Reading habits and books

Among young people, the bestsellers are a mix of self-help and escapism. Walk into any bookshop on Dinh Le street in Hanoi and the front table is covered with titles about habits and productivity, right next to Japanese manga and translated romance. Serious literary fiction sells, but mostly to people who already love it. Personally, I'd defend reading for pleasure as every bit as valuable as reading to learn, and possibly more so in the long run. A novel doesn't hand you five tips, but it makes you spend three hundred pages inside someone else's head, which is about the best training in empathy I can think of. It also builds the stamina to concentrate, and that is exactly what textbooks require later. That said, I accept there's a limit: someone who reads nothing but light thrillers for twenty years probably isn't stretching themselves much, so a balance makes sense. As for printed books, I'm fairly confident they'll survive, just in smaller numbers. E-readers have won the practical argument, since they're cheaper, lighter and you can carry a whole shelf onto a plane. But paper has become something closer to a pleasure object. People like the smell, the cover, the fact that a child can't accidentally open a game on it. I imagine print will end up like vinyl records, no longer the default but cherished by those who care.