[TimMason]

There are books that lend themselves to visualization, as if they were written with Hollywood in mind. There are other books that lend themselves more to reading that concentrates upon the words. I enjoy both, although sometimes the writing of a visual book will put me off to the extent that I cannot continue reading (I have been unable to finish any book by Dan Brown, for example), and sometimes the writerly writer may seem too pleased with his own ingenuity.

There are people who cannot read. Apart from those who suffer from some condition of the brain, there are children who, when they arrive at school, have never had the opportunity to master story-construction. If you ask them, for example, to tell you a story that they have watched on television, they will give you a series of disconnected episodes; there is no "and then"... Probably these children come from homes where there is little interaction between child and adult, and where watching television is a solitary pursuit. Schools find it very difficult to know how to teach these children, and usually do not manage to do so. That is why something like 17 percent of American teenagers are functionally illiterate. They cannot read books.

p.S. I do not mean to imply that this is a problem which is unique to the USA; the researcher whose investigations I am relying on is French. Other advanced economies have similar functional illiteracy rates.