The day before the Macworld keynote, I wrote a list of some of the products I would love to see from Apple. Among that list was my wish for a well-designed e-book reader.

I’ve had the chance to play with the Amazon Kindle, and while I do like many aspects of Amazon’s reading device, I still think that it would benefit from the Apple design touch.

Sadly, it looks like Steve Jobs has no intention, whatsoever, to capitalize on the reader market:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

As much as I consider Steve Jobs a visionary — and even somewhat of a demi-god — I think he’s really missing something here, and that he’s wrong about the popularity of reading in contemporary society. Or at least I hope he is.

Why reading is not dead

Traveling in Europe gives me faith in the power of books. In a commuter culture that is still heavily tied to rail travel rather than driving, I’m almost guaranteed to see at least 50% of travelers engaged in reading of some kind. Sure, iPods and other media players may be gaining ground, but reading is still a basic and easy form of entertainment for most commuters.

It is exactly this ease that has ensured that reading has not died with the rise in ubiquity of video and audio. After all, if you were to compare the number of blogs to the number of podcasts on the internet, you’ll see that the difference in number is quite striking. With the barrier for entry for blogging being so low, reading and writing is still the bedrock of the world wide web, despite the appeal and gloss of other kinds of media.

The web isn’t the only place where ease of entry is crucial to the survival of reading: it’s still rare to see your furniture bundled with an assembly video. Paper is cheap, easy to bundle, and — in places with good levels of literacy — still remains the best way to convey information to a large number of consumers.

Why reading should not die

I’m going to save you from the rhetoric that you usually get from book-enthusiasts: sure, reading is good for your intellectual growth and educational pursuits, but that’s not the reason it needs to be saved from extinction.

For me, however, the importance of reading lies not in its intellectual merits, but in the maintenance of diversity.

It’s clear that video and audio are compelling mediums for sharing information and ideas — after all, television is still one of the most dominant forms of media in the world. What makes media like the world wide web more absorbing than television, however, is the integration of various ways of delivering messages: podcasts, blogs, streaming video, and images all get their equal due on the web, and this makes the web more accessible to different types of people looking to consume different kinds of media.

This diversity is key outside the framework of the web as well: having a variance in the types of information and entertainment available to the general public makes that same information more easily accessible and more likely to be consumed by a larger audience. By eliminating reading and only relying on other forms of media such as video and audio, we not only eliminate a valid entry-point into information, but we eliminate a compelling form of reaction and response as well.

Text may seem like a less interesting format than video or even audio, but it is still integral — and will be for several years to come — to the effective dissemination of knowledge and entertainment.

Your parents may have told you reading was important because it exercised your imagination, but these days, text is important because it is another way for your imagination to react and respond to the stimuli it experiences.

All that to say: Will Pate, if you do decide to forgo the book deal and instead create a video, call me and let me write the accompanying text for your video. I’ll even do it for free.