Here at Woodlawn over half of my training sessions are for the eReaders and eBooks. I teach a lot of seniors and although a lot of them are skeptical about using this new technology for reading, they quickly see the benefits of having an eReader versus buying/borrowing physical copies of books. Because of this recent shift towards digital reading, it makes me wonder about the future of physical books - especially in retail environments. For example, Borders has already filed for bankruptcy protection and is reporting large decreases in revenue. Your thoughts on this shift?
I'm glad that unlike television, the internet is a media that does not exist in opposition to books. I still worry that the internet can develop as such that users slowly lose their attention spans. I think that eBooks are one use of the internet that overcomes this problem.
ReplyDeleteHere is a graph that shows something really interesting -- that the rise of television at first seemed to give way to the fall in popularity of books. That concerns me. But as we see the popularity of the internet increase, you can see that the popularity of television falls and the popularity of books rise once again.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=internet%2Ctelevision%2Cbooks&year_start=1900&year_end=2010&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Wow, great graph. Glad to see that....
ReplyDeleteAs an English student, and lover, I will likely never switch to E-reading. Part of the joy of reading is turning the pages, and having the physical novel in your hands, in my opinion!
But I think the option is still great to have. One plus: downloading University materials rather than lugging huge textbooks around campus and hurting your back!