If you read nonfiction, is it really reading? What about enjoying text on a screen? In her monthly blog post, contributor Cindy Orr ponders what genres and formats count—or should count—as reading.

Why is it that when we talk about reading for pleasure, we just assume we’re talking about fiction? Does reading a nonfiction book not count as real reading?

If we think of such enjoyable nonfiction books as The Lost City of Z or Outliers or Three Cups of Tea, we’d probably agree that nonfiction books can be just as pleasurable as fiction.

And what about reading magazines, or blogs, or cereal boxes, for that matter? Somehow that doesn’t seem to count as reading either, which may help explain why some say that boys and men read less than women, or that we all read less than our forebears.

Maybe men and boys don’t read less, maybe they just read differently from women and girls. (See our earlier post, The Myth of the Male Non-Reader.) And maybe we’re not reading less overall, as one study showed, but just reading different things that we don’t think of classifying as “reading” when the surveyers call.

I’ve often thought that one of the problems with the Reading at Risk report, which traces a decline in “literary reading,” is that their definition of “literary” is a novel, a short story, poetry, or a play. Survey participants were asked about audiobooks, but not eBooks, and it’s quite possible that some people who were surveyed didn’t believe that reading on a screen would count at all. This survey reveals the typical prejudice against nonfiction and reading on a screen.

But wait…here’s an unusual take: one expert believes that “fiction has become culturally irrelevant,” and that “the greatest storytellers of our time are the nonfiction writers.” And another author who covers popular culture points out that we seem to be living through a time when reality rules–as proved by the popularity of television reality programs, the increase in sales of nonfiction books, and what some have called the era of the memoir.

So this leaves us with a conundrum: We’re reading more nonfiction than ever, nonfiction is better than ever. Yet, when we talk or are surveyed about reading, we may be forgetting to discuss one of the most important genres of our time. Let’s hear it for nonfiction!