New blog posts will hopefully be coming your way very soon, but in the meantime, here’s another revamped blog post, originally published a year ago under the title, “Stop Sharing This Graphic for Book Lovers.” It critiques a regularly shared meme as not only false but also pushing some misguided and harmful views about physical books vs. any other form of reading. The post has been updated but you can still read it at the same URL as before.
“The problem isn’t really this specific graphic, though, because the creator has already recalled it, and more importantly, there are many other graphics that convey a similar message.
The societal attitudes conveyed in the graphic are the problem, and the fact that those attitudes are so easy to relate to that more than four years after the graphic was recalled, it’s still getting shared regularly. As much as I love books, I recognize that attaching morality to reading books, only physical books, and only ones that you bought at a local bookstore actually decreases the number of people who are able to read them.”
About the writer: Kella Hanna-Wayne is the creator, editor, and main writer for Yopp. She specializes in educational writing about civil rights, disability, chronic illness, abuse, and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Her work has been published in Ms. Magazine blog, The BeZine, and Splain You a Thing and in 2022, she released a self-published book of poetry, “Pet: the Journey from Abuse to Recovery“. You can find her @KellaHannaWayne on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Medium, and Twitter.