Linguistic accidents

[regshoe]

I really dislike how the word 'consume' is applied to stories (in various media—books, films, video games, songs etc.). Something that's consumed is used up, destroyed in a single event, passed up the trophic levels of the ecosystem. If I consume a piece of cake, it's gone, no one else can eat it, but with stories you can literally have your cake and eat it too—if I read a book, the book is still there just as it was before for other people to read, and this applies to both the particular physical copy and the book as an abstract object. I think this distinction is important, because it's fairly fundamental to how stories work.

(It doesn't work in the capitalist sense of 'consume', either, because that just means buying products—capitalism doesn't care whether I read the book. I think this is another area where conflation of concepts is not a good idea).

It's especially frustrating because I don't get the sense that people are using the word this way out of any particular wish to liken reading a book to consumption, but simply because English doesn't have a convenient catch-all word for reading a book/watching a film/playing a video game/listening to a song/etc. (See also: how much grief we could have avoided if 'asexual' and 'ally' hadn't happened to begin with the same letter).