The Booking Through Thursday question for today is:

What is reading, anyway? Novels, comics, graphic novels, manga, e-books, audiobooks — which of these is reading these days? Are they all reading? Only some of them? What are your personal qualifications for something to be “reading” — why? If something isn’t reading, why not? Does it matter? Does it impact your desire to sample a source if you find out a premise you liked the sound of is in a format you don’t consider to be reading? Share your personal definition of reading, and how you came to have that stance.

Well, I think all of them are reading (except audiobooks. That’s listening. I like doing that sometimes, too, though). Dragging your eyes across a page or screen to understand words and derive meaning from them is reading in any format. So this seems a bit of an odd question to me.

On the other hand, I used to lament that my sons weren’t the readers that I had hoped they would be when we read multitudes of books when they were little. But then I realized my oldest son does read all the time — not the classics I love and would like to share and discuss, but multitudes of things online and on his PDA. It’ still reading. He’s just more interested in newsy and techie things.

So to me it’s more a matter of just preference. I love curling up on the couch with an old-fashioned real live book, especially a classic or fiction. I do read more on the computer than I used to. I don’t have a PDA, and there are times I would like the portability and compactness of it, but I don’t think I could stand to read very much for very long on that tiny screen.

Booking through Thursday is a weekly meme around the subject of books. The hostess poses a question which participants answer according to their own thoughts and opinions on their own blogs, linking back to the BTT site, which can be found by clicking on the button above.