People don't talk about books anymore

According to data from the ISBN Agency, in 2014, the last year for which there are records, in Spain 90 thousand literary titles were published between publishers and self-publishing platforms, of which they were sold 20 million fiction books, 2 of them belonging to 50 Sombras de Gray.

In turn, a 38% of the Spanish population say they never read or almost never, while the remaining 62% only 20% read daily, with which it could be said that only 9 of the 46.77 million Spaniards they are considered regular readers. And what does this translate into? In that there is a great offer but a not so clear demand, which leads me to think that people don't talk about books anymore, who does not read, who see literature as something typical of another time. And the question is: Why?

Yes the cover is pretty

A few days ago, an acquaintance asked me if I knew "what books were good" to give one to a regular family member to read every day. When my proposals did not convince him too much, he dropped the tagline: Because they haven't released a new one from Gray, right?

Other examples that come to mind are the collections of old books that some wear at home because it "looks nice", or the person who picks up a book because the cover calls him and by the time you tell him what it is about, he has already left it on your site. Yes, there seems to be a great general suspicion to dive into the literature beyond a phrase written on the Facebook wall said by an author that no one really knows.

When I was little, I had many books in my house, all the Disney ones from Ediciones Gaviota with their great drawings, or my father's bookshelf (one of those 9 million readers) that I was unraveling over time. However, today I see children who barely raise their eyebrows from their console, who consult video game tutorials on YouTube at the age of 8 or who do not go out to play with other children because they are more aware of the gazillion animation channels on television . Talking about literature means doing something that they associate directly with school and those imposed books that end up skipping two or more chapters even though they have control over it at the end of the week.

For the new generations, literature has been overshadowed by other forms of leisure more snapshots such as cinema, television, video games and, especially in recent years, that technology called the Internet whose Google explorer a 5-year-old child knows how to open before a book, a story or any other form of attachment to literature .

But the thing does not end there. In adulthood, many people don't seem to read or talk about books either. You sit down to have a beer and talk about whore and mengano, Game of Thrones or the last gathering of Save me. Literature (except for exceptions such as the aforementioned Gray or, say, Twilight), seems something that belongs to another time, to another time, to a parallel world in which a few people gather in a cafe to ramble on prints and books that were crushed by new forms of entertainment.

The worst of it all is not the fact that people no longer read so much or do not know which book is One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Odyssey or Blood Wedding. Perhaps the problem is the way in which we make many children feel allergic to literature from a young age. But I am neither a father nor a teacher. . .

What is your opinion?