Responding to last week's hysterical rant about how Republicans are keeping the masses from reading, or whatever it was John Freeman was on about, The Written Nerd finds the silver lining for American publishers. "Remember in 2004, when the National Endowment for the Arts led by Dana Gioia released the Reading at Risk survey, and everyone in the book world got really sad and scared?" writes Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, the events coordinator at SoHo's McNally Robinson. "The NEA survey states that 56% of Americans read any book in 2002... The AP/Ipsos survey say that 73% of Americans read any book last year (i.e. in 2006). Therefore, if these two respected organizations are to be believed... AMERICANS READ MORE LAST YEAR THAN THEY READ FIVE YEARS AGO."

"The numbers are still lower than one would like them to be," Stockton Bagnulo admits, and BET Animation is doing its bit to win over some of the non-reading holdouts. Last week, LAT reporter Greg Braxton wrote about the network's controversial "Read A Book" cartoon, a hip-hop parody from D'Mite. How NSFW is this YouTube clip? Let's put it this way: The first verse is "Read a book, read a book, read a m-----f------' book." It also contains a racial epithet that has been officially condemned by the New York City Council to which even the Times generally only refers in euphemistic terms.

"This is not a good way to address children," warns one commentator quoted in the Times article. "Reading a book should, hopefully, enable children to communicate in a more positive manner than this video." But BET animation VP Denys Cowan counters: "The magic of animation is that it can take complex ideas and present them in an entertaining and clear way. And this is a positive message."