Fischer discusses society's dedication to public literacy in the sweeping educational reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries, and notes the appearance of free libraries, gender differences in reading matter, public advertising and the "forbidden" lists of Church, State and the unemancipated. Finally, he assesses the future, in which it is likely that read communication will soon exceed oral communication through the use of the personal computer and the internet, and looks at "visual language" and modern theories of how reading is processed in the human brain. Asking how the new reader can reshape reading's future, he suggests a radical new definition of what reading could be.

Author Biography

Steven Roger Fischer is Director of the Institute of Polynesian Languages and Literatures in Auckland, New Zealand. A History of Reading is the final book in Fischer's trilogy which also includes A History of Language and A History of Writing, as well as Island at the End of the World: The Turbulent History of Easter Island, all available from Reaktion Books.