Here’s One on the Big Read, a quest to find the favorite novel and encourage reading in the land of Shakespeare.
The BBC-sponsored event definitely spurred book sales in Great Britain. But in this visual age, it also generated a huge spike in purchases of DVD film and television versions of the favorites.
Take Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (No. 2 behind the winner: J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”). The 19th-century tale of courtship and conceit saw a 73 percent jump in book sales over the period — and a 977 percent rise in DVD sales of a television series based on the book, according to data from Amazon.com, the online vendor.
Watching is always easier than reading
Viewing is a passive activity. Students prefer it over reading assigned texts. I’m not surprised that the public in general wants movies instead of books. Too many people have vocabularies too small to deal with many of the classics anyhow. Heck, I bet that in the USA that there would be no spike in book sales. At least the UK can be proud that some people bought books when prodded.