What is reading?

I am in no way a reading teacher and I will be the first to admit I spend little time reading from books. That being said, something that happened recently led me to the question "what is reading?"

Today, most of our literature comes from screen reading. That is where I get most of my reading done. Twitter, blogs, news sites, etc is really the only reading I do.

Our school has implemented a reading competition for both staff and students. I didn't know if I wanted to join the competition because I don't read from books. The competition committee said that they would only count pages from books and not picture books for kids. Well those are really the only books I read (since I have 4 kids under the age of 5).

I wanted to know why reading content online didn't count. I wasn't meaning reading the newspaper but why not educational links and blogs? In a day I probably read just as much as anyone reading some romance novel but I can't count it in the competition?

I don't want to discourage people from reading books (although I think more people are turning to Kindles, Nooks, and other e-readers) but that just isn't me. I am constantly moving and when I get a second I pop up something on my phone or computer and read when I can.

So what is reading? What do we expect of our students? In the near future where will we do our most reading? Just some questions that I have.