Jane Root, Controller of BBC2, has had a big idea. It's called The Big Read, almost an anagram. Last autumn, the Great Britons series, culminating in a vote to choose between the 10 greatest Britons, was reckoned a great success. Well over a million viewers eventually participated in the poll. Root has decided that the format can be adopted for books, too. Although plans are still at an early stage, the intention is to launch The Big Read with a programme in late March or early April, inviting viewers to nominate 100 of their favourite books over the following fortnight or so.

Numerous events will be coordinated around this list (presented only in alphabetical order at this stage). There'll be programmes all over the BBC networks and linkups with libraries and retailers too, not to mention readers' groups and on-line data-bases.

In November, the top 10 books will be announced - and the case for each one will, as with Great Britons, be made in a one-hour special programme, presented by a celebrity, or at the very least a personality. Finally, before Christmas, there will be another giant vote. The result? It's almost certain that The Lord of the Rings will triumph over Harry Potter, in a tightly fought contest. Or vice versa.

So here we have the latest attempt to get pigs airborne, or rather to make books work on television. Root is full of confidence: "What we want is for this to be the biggest celebration of reading that Britain has ever seen, and we hope that this will lead to a lot of people buying books," she has said.

The overall project producer, Hannah Beckerman, believes The Big Read will create a sense of "ownership" and "engagement" in viewers, and points out that the nominations will be for the "best-loved" rather than "greatest" books. Mike Poole, the producer who originally mooted The Big Read, says: "There are huge plans to put this out there - like one huge kind of virus that's pretty inescapable really. At its most ambitious, we'd like to see books placed in EastEnders and so on."

The Big Read is perhaps best understood not just as a horror but as an historical inevitability. Lists, quizzes, celebrity commendations and polls are now our main way of ordering our thoughts, for want of a better word. Where once individuals or institutions felt able autocratically to pronounce on what was best, now we relish this mutant form of democracy, so suitable for email and texting.

There's no reason why the method can't be applied to any subject, from books to bottoms. But more easily to bottoms than to books - there are very good reasons why books programmes have never yet succeeded on television.

Books are nothing less than the opposite of television: the opposition to it. We have been most forcefully reminded of this recently by Jonathan Franzen, the author of The Corrections. In a 1995 essay, The Reader in Exile, Franzen said bitterly: "For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born." When The Corrections was chosen for the enormously influential Oprah Winfrey Book Club, Franzen refused to play ball.

Filming for the show back in his hometown, he burst out: "This is so fundamentally bogus!" When he said he didn't want Oprah's "logo of corporate ownership" on the cover of his book, she cancelled his appearance. A hero, then, him.

As Franzen commented in another essay: "The writer for whom the printed word is paramount is, ipso facto, an untelevisable personality..." You can film the more obliging ones hard at work, if you want to, scribbling away with a pencil or poking at a keyboard.

You can also interview them about their books - bravely swallowing the fact that writers tend to be unremarkable-looking people, some of them more than middleaged, many male, not to say bearded and balding. But why bother? Writers compose themselves in print to be more articulate, appealing and intelligent than they are in person. Getting them in person is not getting them at their best.

And as for books themselves! They are, it must be agreed, short on colour and movement. They really are nothing much to look at, both in themselves - they tend just to sit there, inert oblongs - and in their use.

Few human activities are duller to watch than other people reading. It goes on for hours and nothing much happens on the outside.

Books, sorry to say, are not events. For those who love them, that is part of their attraction. They exist both in and out of time. As a reader, you can pick up a book at any point in your life. You can take it at your own pace, slowing down, speeding up, pausing, re-reading, skipping, as you like. And, however much you may want to talk about it afterwards, reading is a solitary activity.

But to work on television, books have to be converted into communal events. One way of doing this is to set up a contest, as has been done with the

Booker Prize, whereby novels are treated as competitors in a race. Another way is to engineer a heated debate in a studio, between a panel of reviewers. None of these methods has proved exciting enough for there to have been any substantial books coverage whatsoever on mainstream British television lately.

Now we have The Big Read coming up, the ultimate attempt to find a way around the plain fact that books make poor television, compared with almost anything except possibly maths. Or watching paint dry.

Perhaps we should instead just admit that books and television are not natural partners. Whereas, on the other hand, books and radio go together perfectly. "It's a marriage," as Mike Poole admits. For radio is already the word, already literature, and the coverage on the radio these days is both substantial and excellent.

But no, we mustn't admit it. Television is our master. If books are to prosper, they must do so through the small screen. Publishers and booksellers are well aware that the best-seller lists are now dominated by television spin-offs and aide-memoires. After poor Christmas sales, they have welcomed The Big Read with abject enthusiasm.

Root has told the trade magazine, The Bookseller: "We hope that people will want to own the top 10 books. I am sure a lot will want to own the top 100." The way forward, then: Everyviewer's Library. You could call it sleeping with the enemy.