Where's the bookshop? ... Salina, Utah

Last week I spent 22 hours in Las Vegas. It's amazing what blossoms in the desert when irrigated by cash: acres of smooth asphalt; a replica of Manhattan with a roller coaster threading through it. Good luck finding a book, though.

Of course, the point of Vegas is not to read, but there is something spooky about a town without books, let alone newspapers. Just before we left town, my friend and I stumbled upon a couple quietly reading The Wall Street Journal. "Where did you get that?" we gasped.

What goes for Vegas goes - to a certain extent - for the rest of America. You won't find dancing fountain jets in Los Angeles but you can go miles in many American towns without seeing anything bound between covers.

Even in New York City, the so-called literary epicenter of America, books are becoming scarcer. Many of the venerable independent bookstores have closed down, as have the used bookstores. Jump on a downtown subway train and you'll be lucky to see more than a couple of people reading books.

Now a study has put a figure on the decline of reading in the US. One in four Americans read no books last year. Nothing. Not even the Bible.

America has always had one of the lowest literacy rates in the western world. The former book review editor of the LA Times, Steve Wasserman put it bluntly. "Reading has always been a minority taste in America," he said, "and that's OK." But I think what we're seeing now is something new which has to do with how a culture operates when all values become subservient to that of making money - when reading is not supported either from on top and from below.

One major part of the Republican revolution has been a full-scale assault on public welfare programming - which includes our national education budget. Indeed, Reagan ran on the platform that if elected he would abolish the department of education. Happily, that didn't happen, but as America's public schools turn out more and more illiterate children, the call has gone up to take the money we put into schools and put it into a private school system.

At the same time, the industries which support reading have been ground up and fed through the increasing corporatisation of American life. Book publishers and newspapers have been bought up by giant conglomerates. Publishers, once mildly profitable, have been forced to keep up with blockbuster driven media; newspapers, once wildly profitable, have been used as cash cows. And now that the media companies are done with these newspapers, those same owners are cutting back on all forms of news, including book pages.

And all the while reading is under assault from new forms of technology. At what point do we halt and do something drastic?

In fairness, some attempts are being made to counteract these trends. The National Endowment of the Arts has started up a program called The Big Read, which turns entire cities into book clubs. Online sites and journals like The Complete Review and the new and improved Bookforum have started up to counteract the loss of book coverage in the media. On television, shows like the Colbert Report and the Daily Show dedicate half of their entire program to conversation with an author. And Dave Eggers has turned his McSweeney's journal into an empire of generosity, starting up drop-in tutoring centers like 826 NYC and 826 Seattle. Visit one of these and it's hard to doubt the lure of reading and writing.

But it is not enough.

We live in a visual culture now, one where a large part of what we see and absorb is telling us to buy. Barring a revolution, America will remain a consumer society, so I think some of the campaign to get people reading again in America should involve making books visible.

Now that cigarettes are becoming less and less palatable in an actor's hand, put a book there. If the NEA wants people to read, strong-arm a copy of William Carlos Williams' The Doctor Stories onto Grey's Anatomy. Companies which spend millions of advertising dollars articulating their brand could say a lot more for less by using books. Why doesn't The Gap stock copies of On the Road?

This may sound crass and ridiculous, but so is America. And if we can put a Parisian café on the strip in Las Vegas, the least we can do is put a book in the hands of the people sitting there.