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• Historic Fort York David Spittal courtesy murmur.com
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According to many cultural pundits, reading full-length books is becoming a lot like using VHS cassettes, owning only a home phone and accessing the Web through dial-up: a relic of the past that virtually no one under the age of 30 does anymore (save for Harry Potter and The Secret).

In an age where young people are bombarded day after day by thousands of digital distractions, it's understandable some people would lament the decline of reading among youth.

Reading is a time-consuming, slow-moving activity. For these reasons, books are, indeed, engaged in an uphill battle against 140-character Twitter posts, YouTube videos, iPhones and snack-sized free commuter dailies.

Of course, alarmist logic when it comes to the decline in reading is fairly straightforward: young people (and some of their older brethren) aren't reading weighty tomes, intelligent magazines or even broadsheet newspapers en masse. They're going online for all their information needs - a free option that, in theory, trumps the paid-for print industry.

That view, however, is wrong. While there has been a demonstrated shift in youth reading habits over the past several years - the US National Endowment of the Arts released a report last year where, among other claims, it said almost half of 18 to 24-year-old Americans don't read for pleasure at all - it's undeniable that young people do read. A lot.

More to the point, it will be digital applications that will help pave the way for a new golden age of reading in the years to come.

Let's start with a question: What do youth value most when it comes to how they consume their media? The easy answer is portability, ease of use and reliability. The hard part, however, has to be two things: what kinds of content are appealing and how best to deliver it.

Admittedly, those two big questions of the publishing industry are no different than those facing other businesses in the creative media fields, namely music and movies. But unlike those two mediums, reading is the most portable, easy to use and reliable source of information out there.

Ironically, it's digital devices like the iPhone that are helping to spur on a renewed interest in e-books - a technology once left for dead as no better than reading hours of text on a computer screen (a practice very few of us can do for more than half an hour at a time without eye strain). The iPhone's App Store has the e-reading application Stanza available for free download; it's a program that allows people to read text easily on the iPhone screen. You can also download hundreds of classic books by Charles Dickens, Issac Newton and dozens more with Stanza - all for free.

Of course, Amazon.com made huge waves in the publishing industry last year with the release of its Kindle device, a U.S.-only product that allows people to store and read best-selling titles (from Amazon, of course), subscribe to newspapers and have free access to Wikipedia and an unlimited number of blogs. The best part? It's been designed to be easy on the eyes. It's portable, reliable and easy to use.

Sony is also getting into the eBook game with the release of its Sony PRS-500 Reader, a multimedia device that even in direct sunlight has viewable text.

Of course, both the Kindle and Sony Reader are not without their detractors. Aside from the usual criticisms from non-adopters - why buy an eReader when I can buy the book? - there's one looming issue Amazon, Sony and even book publishers have not wrapped their heads around: the use of proprietary software.

Like Apple's iTunes Store, many e-book companies remain locked in a debate over the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software to govern how a person uses their media. While most young people shun DRM as an overly intrusive way for corporations to control people's media habits in general, it's a dangerous practice for an industry struggling to make ends meet.

But really, e-books are only part of the solution. Written content delivery mechanisms we use every day - blogs, web portals, eReaders to name a few - are already in place and in wide use. Young people use these platforms more than any other generation.

The much larger question is: how do businesses get the kids engaged in written material in the first place? At the end of the day, the form in which content is delivered matters less than what youth are reading.

Think back to my off-hand comment about Harry Potter. The biggest lesson the publishing industry can take out of the Harry Potter phenomenon is simple: while a story must be good for kids to care, the written material must be placed in a broader multimedia context. This means taking a book as part of a broader media strategy that includes digital media - television, movies and even video games being part of the package. Indeed, big-name books are quickly becoming merely a component of a corporation's much larger approach at marketing a brand and not just a book title.

Some may argue such an idea runs counter to the notion of reading as an act of being cultured, engaged and aware of the world beyond the instant gratification of the digital world. Perhaps they have a point.

Yet, in a world where digital distractions aren't going away (and, in fact, are increasing rapidly), the way we all read is going to change even further. It will become an increasingly disjointed, fragmented experience. Our sense of time while we read will become more compressed, more clearly delineated by our need to stay connected to the online world.

While some people may hate this idea, it's a reality we all must face up to: reading is changing, and we should adjust our ideas about it to fit with the Internet age.