I agree that this world doesn't exist, but I'm not sure that's a reason to discount the article. In that context the article should just be read as a warning rather than a lamentation, if that makes sense. I agree, and so do the authors of the article and the study:I wonder where this world is that newspaper writers live in, where ebooks have wholly superseded physical books rather than supplemented them.
Households with a larger number of books in them have children who have better reading ability, but perhaps that has more to do with the types of parents that stock large numbers of books in their home, rather than spontaneous discovery of books on shelves by presumably bored children.
“It is a big question of whether it’s the books themselves or the parental scholarly culture that matters — we’re guessing it’s somewhere in between,” said Mariah Evans, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Reno. “The books partly reflect intelligence.”
I have a step-brother who is very young right now. He knows, very well, the ins and outs of a cell phone, can find videos, play music, and so on. This is barely at the age of 4 or 5. This guy assumes kids aren't getting access to technology or media, because it's hidden away on cell phones a kid can't access. Except they can. Not only that, they have the internet, and the fact that people listen to music everywhere now, radio, television, culture. They see the text on phones, and they likely will want to learn to read it as well. There is no danger here, just luddites.
Where in the article does he say anything about kids not getting access to technology or media? His concern is the decline in sharing that results from the digitization of parents' media: and later: Will parents go out of their way to grant access to their latest book to their 9-year-old? True, the 9-year-old is unlikely to pick up a physical copy of “Between the World and Me” on his or her own, either, but at least the child sees that tome on a shelf and incorporates it into an understanding of what a life of the mind entails. As an unshared e-book, it is never glimpsed, let alone handled and, possibly, someday read.The albums stacked up next to the record player, in plain sight for years, would be invisible MP3s on a computer or phone that I didn’t own. Their proximal existence could have been altogether unknown to me.
Amazon Kindle’s Family Library enables two adults in a household to share content with each other and up to four children. But parents must explicitly select which of their books their kids can read. So much for the “casual atmosphere of living in a bookish world.”