I did it. Yes, that's right, me. I cracked open a book for a leisurely read yesterday after quite a drought into my literature delving.
The book at stack is conveniently located to the left of this text, from the writer of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk.
Now I don't know if I have ever opened a novel during the term for leisure so this could be a first. All this made me think about the direction print is going.
Personally, there are instances such as magazines that I'd rather hold in my hand than just read a feed at the magazine's website. We will call the reason the flip factor. I like flipping through some magazine's, while others the only way I'll read a multi-page article is if it is in my hands.
Amazon.com launched the Kindle a little while back and I don't know how I feel about it. It has sold out but I just wonder how many people read full novels on such a device. I can see a newspaper or magazines, after all there is still something that people can hold and technically page through media, but a full novel spells eyestrain for me.
However, I haven't used it yet and with music collections going almost completely digital why not book collections too? Full libraries could be contained in a room big enough to fit the servers necessary to hold the files. Sounds crazy but think of how much space could be saved.
Where would this put public libraries? If anyone could simply download a book from a library in the comfort of their home why would anyone need to actually BUY books. Would having the file only last for a certain amount of time do anything to remedy this?
All of this is purely speculation from my brain to my keyboard to my blog to your eyes.
ofersure
-mak
1 comment:
Hi! Interesting post--I wish I had the time to read for fun!
But I don't think that libraries will go out of business just because of the Internet. E-books have been around for nearly 10 years, but they haven't even come close to replacing paper texts. My high school has them and they were really popular at first, but everyone went back to paper books within a couple months.
It might be because, according to studies, readers tend to scan electronic text more than paper. I always tend to get more out of reading an actual book. Something about the smell and the texture make the text seem more tangible. I dunno, I guess that's weird.
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