For Cheryl Oncea, the question is not why the Islands need the Hawaii Book and Music Festival, but why it's only in its third year.

Oncea, who took on the task of coordinating volunteers for the first Book and Music event, this year will attend just for the joy of it. "It's free. It's family friendly. It's in this lovely location with the trees and the grass. And anything that promotes reading is a good thing," said Oncea, who is general sales manager of KGMB-TV and who, despite a busy life, always has "a book going."

Oncea sounds like a star-struck teenager when she recalls how she felt just being in a room with Greg Mortenson, co-author of the Kiriyama Prize-winning "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time" (Viking, 2006). "To hear him speak, I was so knocked out ..." she said.

The Islands host music festivals almost every weekend, but events focused on books are fewer and generally smaller in scope. Book and Music Festival executive director Roger Jellinek, a literary agent who has helped many local authors, said festival attendance doubled from 10,000 to 20,000 in the first two years. "There is no other event like it; it's a unique assembly of writers and storytellers in a variety of media, including music," he said.

A difference between this music festival and others is that interaction between artist and audience is strongly encouraged. The players are asked to talk about the stories in and behind their songs, Jellinek said.

One reason this festival is so young may be a notion that causes local book lovers to roll their eyes: "Hawai'i people don't read."

Jellinek, who moved here 15 years ago, recalls when there were just a handful of book stores: Honolulu Book Shops, Waldenbooks, three or four used book shops. Now there are more than 14 Borders and Borders Express stores in the Islands, plus Barnes & Noble, Bestsellers and Bookends on O'ahu. "They're not tourist spots; they're being used by locals," said Jellinek. "And Target is coming in and they're a major seller of books" (Though the store won't open until next year, Target is sponsoring the keiki tent at the festival.)

The "we don't read" idea should have been put to bed years ago, said writer Alice Ann Parker of Hau'ula, when Borders Books & Music opened in Waikele and was immediately mobbed and stayed so for months.

A new Borders opened last year on Parker's side of the mountains, in Windward Mall, and it, too, has been eagerly embraced.

"Finally, those fools have realized how hungry people here are for this combination of a broad spectrum of books and good coffee," said Parker, author of a non-fiction work on dream analysis, a novel about a culture in which dreams are taken seriously, and an upcoming memoir. "People here are culturally curious in a more general and open way than in any other place that I've ever lived, and I've lived in a lot of places that are considered intellectually stimulating: New York, the Bay Area, London."

Parker, like most people who love reading, wishes she could communicate its joys and rewards to everyone, but her approach is characteristically clever and subversive.

In a panel discussion last year, she advocated licensing the right to buy or borrow books. You'd have to qualify for a book license and, after buying or borrowing a book, prove you'd read it.

"It seems to me my life has been ruined by reading," she says, tongue glued to cheek. "I'm looking at a bookshelf right now that's about 10 feet high and 20 feet long. It's jammed and I want more. I'm a junkie. People get addicted to books. It's dangerous. What we ought to be saying is not, 'Read, it's good for you,' but 'Be careful, there's danger here, you might learn things you don't what to know. People read books and they get ideas and ideas are dynamite.' "

INSPIRING KEIKI TO WRITE

Margaret and Frank South are wooing young people into a reading life via another route: writing. The two — he's the former executive producer of "Baywatch Hawaii" and she was a Hollywood writer, script analyst and producer, living here now — work with at-risk K-12 students in more than 30 local schools and at Palama Settlement.

They are bringing the Kids Talk Story approach that Margaret South developed to the festival. Young people will be invited to write their stories and to help make a book of the work. And Frank South will read select stories from these efforts, and from previous students, on the stage in the keiki area.

The young people will be handed a clipboard, a piece of paper and a pen or pencil and paired with a trained writing specialist who will tease out their willingness to write.

The process always begins with resistance, Margaret South said: "I don't want to write. I don't have anything to say. I don't know how."

They suggest writing about a happy memory. "I don't have any happy memories," some respond.

But then the mentors get the young people talking, and soon they're scribbling.

South attended the festival in its first year, just out of curiosity: "It was a crowd of people who loved books, and that makes a nice, mellow feeling and I like mellow," she said. The second year, the Souths had a booth. She, too, sounds giddy when she talks about meeting author Mortenson — since few publishers include The Islands in book tours, he was someone she never thought she'd see in person here.

Joan Gencarelli, president of the local Pen Women chapter for writers and artists and author of an upcoming memoir on her years as a child evacuee during World War II, will help out in the Bamboo Ridge bookstore this year. She says that, judging by the busyness of her local Kailua Library, and its bustling secondhand book sales operation, anyone who says Islanders don't read isn't paying attention.

And she says a book festival meshes with the host culture here: "A part of history here is storytelling, chant and stories and the hula and genealogy. This event fits right in."