“When it happens, this uptick in reading will be about as salient a behavioral change as we’ve ever ascribed to a technological device — especially if you remember back to the 1980s and 1990s, when common knowledge held the opposite: that we were all quite slowly becoming soporific, TV-guzzling stooges,” Dannen writes. “And it will happen because, for the first time in 600 years, reading will have finally gotten easier.”
Here is why e-book readers will increase reading:
• Tons of choices
• Beauty
• Faster and more fluid
• More comprehensive
• No spam
• They read to you
Dannon writes, “Reading hasn’t kept pace with the improvements of our other human pastimes: listening (to music), talking (by phone) and watching (movies and TV). Unlike with other other media, books have hardly changed. It’s as if they’re mired in roughly the same time period as the daguerrotype, the record, and the telegraph. Paper books aren’t searchable, can’t be easily excerpted, don’t have links to footnotes and can’t backup your notes. They can can show pictures, but not video; they can be released yearly, but can’t be updated every 24 hours. (This isn’t to say I dislike paper books — it’s simply that not every book needs to exist in print.)”
“There are still obstacles, of course: e-book pricing could still end up over-inflated, and e-magazine prices will need to reach approximate parity with their paper counterparts, despite more production cost — but at least we have a good array of devices emerging, and the comfort of knowing that in 20 years, we may be more literate than ever,” Dannon writes.
Read more in the full article here.