By Grant Cabay
Watching a movie. Reading a book. Both are most likely a large part of your life, consuming your free time when you have nothing else to do. In this article, I will be explaining why reading a book is usually better than watching a movie. The broad reasons include that books allow for imagination, and you get more attached to characters in books rather than in movies.
When the reader opens a book without pictures, the author will usually start by describing characters. This will generally give the reader a broad picture of what the characters look like, but will not usually give very specific details. This allows the reader to imagine what the characters look like, rather than being shown a picture of the character. This is important because imagination “aids in the development of social, emotional, creative, physical, lingual, and problem-solving skills in children” (The Importance of Imagination in Child Development). As you can see, books are much better than movies because they allow the reader to imagine the characters, which in turn gives many benefits to the reader.
Another reason why reading a book is better than watching a movie is because when you read a book, you get very attached to the characters. The reason for this is “the average reader will read 300 pages in 8.3 hours” (How Long Does It Take to Read 300 Pages). The average movie length is two hours and 11 minutes. When taking a longer time to do something, you get more attached to it the longer you do it. Because reading a book takes longer than watching a movie, you get more attached to the characters which makes the reading experience better than the movie experience.
Both of these are reasons why reading a book is better than reading a movie. The reader gets more imagination and a better reading experience, so next time the choice to read a book or watch a movie arises, the better choice is usually reading a book.