In this guest post Neil Baptista, CEO of Riffle Books, makes the case for how reading can help you deal with emotional issues.
Last year, The New Yorker published an article outlining an approach called ‘bibliotherapy’, where qualified reading therapists use books to treat people who are dealing with strong emotional challenges. During the therapy, you’re asked questions about your reading habits combined with questions like “What is preoccupying you at the moment?”. After some email back and forth with a personal book therapist, you’ll get a reading prescription identifying books and authors that might help you deal with things like grief, depression, isolation and other worries. The suggestions are not only self-help books, but fiction novels and poetry, basically whatever matches the reader. The therapy comes for a fee of 100 pounds (approximately $130).
The headline for the article is “Can reading make you happier?”. Now, to people who enjoy reading books, including the 44 million Americans who read more than 11 books a year, the answer seems pretty obvious, even without a reading therapist getting involved. There’s nothing like losing yourself in a book!
“reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers.”
Unfortunately, not everyone has the $130 for a personal book therapist to divine what they should be reading. To compound things, the invention of the ebook has removed publishers’ stranglehold on distribution, so the number of books being published has risen dramatically in just the last few years, reaching over 725,000 titles were published in 2015 alone. For context, let’s say you read 10 books per year for 100 years. That means you’ll have the joy of reading 1000 books in your lifetime. That’s just 0.003% of Amazon’s catalog of 32.9 million books, so where do you start? Which books are going to put you into a trance-like bliss and improve your life? From this perspective, selecting your next read becomes a daunting task, and it might even be stressful.
Of course, on the spectrum of discovering books, there are more accessible approaches than bibliotherapy. Visiting an experienced librarian or a book nerd at your local bookstore can yield great suggestions. They’ll each have their own approach which could range from formal — like readers’ advisory, generally practiced at libraries — to oracular, relying on instincts, mood and reading history. Either way, it’s clear that a conversation about books with an expert can illuminate deeper trends in your reading or ‘appeal factors’ that lead you to like certain books or authors. Experts can lead you safely to books that can make you happier, or fulfilled, or expand your horizons or (gasp) entertain you. Book experts can generally reduce your stress related to choosing what to read. The ancient Greeks knew this well when they inscribed ‘a healing place for the soul’ above the entrance to a library in Thebes.
The quandary is that book discovery, like nearly everything, is moving online. The Codex Group, a research firm that has been tracking reading habits for over 10 years has found that 24% of books purchased are now discovered online, as opposed to 15% discovered in all physical locations (physical meaning places like a friend’s bookshelf, in a store, at a library etc.). The trend shows that physical book discovery is being rapidly replaced by digital means.
To support online book discovery most sites have rolled out ‘recommendation algorithms’ that tell you what to read. Cloud computers crunch big data and, presto, they spit out a list of books “you’ll like” or “similar to what other people are reading”. The math is fun, but in the end algorithms lack access to simple context in suggesting books. Things like “how are you feeling?”, “who’s the book for?” and “what have you enjoyed recently?” aren’t really taken into account. In the end, algorithms are emotionless, while books are whole worlds of feeling, whether fact or fantasy. So, what then?
At Riffle we’ve been working on this problem. After all, our mission is “to inspire people to read more books”, and a big part of that is leading them to books they’ll love. We found, not surprisingly, that at the core of finding satisfying books, is a conversation about reading, preferably with a trusted friend or with an expert. We also know that our Riffle members include an expert community of librarians and über readers combining for a massive braintrust on books. Riffle’s expert knowledge is definitely more expansive than the biggest cloud computer! So, what we’re doing is connecting readers directly with experts in the most direct and human way that’s possible within the digital realm. We’re using chat! (or you can call it messaging). No new interface to learn, no forms to fill out, just pure, simple messaging directly with Riffle’s splendid community of expert readers.
So, your book prescription is to take two Riffle ‘expert suggestions’ and call us in the morning. 🙂
Riffle — Inspired Book Recommendations from Experts. Not Algorithms. >>
Reference Links:
ALA resources on bibliotherapy
Pew Research Center:
A Snapshot of Reading in America in 2013
Technology Device Ownership: 2015
E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership Jumps
The New Yorker
“Can Reading Make you happier?”
Medium
Chatbot & Conversational UI : Start here!
This post was originally published on Medium: https://medium.com/@elspectre/reading-as-therapy-458972c472e9#.l6n546vp8
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