问答题 On a flight from Frankfurt to Shanghai, a foreign engineer noticed row after row of Chinese passengers deep into their iPads, playing games or watching movies. None was doing any reading. The engineer posted his observation online and got a tidal wave of responses, most of which corroborated his view. Before we get to “Why Chinese do not read”, I’ll reveal the spoiler, which is the most frequent defense. “We read. We just do not read in the same way as the old generations do. We rely on modern gadgets for faster access.” It is true that you cannot claim that only content on a printed page is knowledge. Anything that’s printed can be displayed digitally. There are millions of books available in digital form. And true electronic books can incorporate sound and video, thus enhancing the reading experience. To those who believe they can get anything and everything from the Web, I’ll hereby add my two cents’ worth: Yes, you can, but you won’t do it. My publishers (I work with several publishing houses in China) told me that most of the best-sellers in China are textbooks or supplement reading material, in other words, books that students are forced to read, or rather, forced to buy. So, let’s compare China’s best-seller list with that of the New York Times. While the latter has a mix of serious books, especially about history, and celebrity memoirs, the former is almost totally nothing. A walk through an airport bookstore will bring you more doom and gloom: mostly how-to-get-rich titles written by those who’ve done it or who claim to have the secret recipe. On top of that, there are buyers of books in China who decorate their rooms with wall-to-wall tomes but never bother to open the pages. Yes, people do read in China to enrich their bank accounts, but not to enrich themselves comprehensively.无