Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Jason Boog, former publishing editor a Mediabistro and author of Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age. They discuss what freaks us out about the idea of a baby with an iPad; his project’s venerable predecessor The Read-Aloud Handbook; the importance of the very act of reading aloud, and especially what he calls “interactive reading”; the fallacy equating amount of books read with intelligence or even knowledge that plagues children and adults alike; how reading became a proxy for well-being; his new appreciation of Los Angeles libraries developed while taking his daughter around to them; how he introduced Mark Twain to the baby; how our generation seems to have proved that kids don’t get wrecked by unlimited access to content; when, exactly, digital reading became acceptable; his move from New York to Los Angeles, and the cities’ comparative reading cultures; his interest in Depression-era writers, and why on some level we still believe that to become a writer means to become poor; how we’ve become “cyborgs, in a real, genuine sense”; what we can learn by watching the first generation who could say no to books grow up; and what culture his daughter has already started introducing to him.
Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.
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