“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.
Do I have kids? I would say yes. Do they read? They’ll read anything they get there hands on, both PS storylines and printed media. Actually the library subscription is one of my best investments and did not cost me $500.
Did I judge the iPad when I expressed my opinion about the article? No I did not. I am just claiming that the article is BS. There is much more choice in printed media that sometimes looks much better. Think of the museum catalog. IPad will not have enough screen real estate to come close to the beauty of the printed catalog.
Open up a newspaper for scimming and speedreading. You’ll get much more info and much faster than by flicking pages to speedread.
Does this mean that the iPad has no advantages? No! But don’t make up a story based on BS.
Surely decreasing the weight to carry is a benefit, but one mentioned in the BS above.
Ebooks in education? Maybe for some part. Totally replacing printed media with digital content cannot happen unless you like to see your 10yrs old to cut up your iPad for some art project. And surely as a teacher I would not be happy if the content of my main education books would constantly change. What would be the baseline of the test for the students?
Therefore I do not declare BS onthe iPad but the article remains an unrealistic fantasy of the author without any scientific justification or value. Therefore BS.
Now THIS is a true advantage to the iPad, and one that I finally agree with!
@Jafo – “Totally replacing printed media with digital content cannot happen unless you like to see your 10yrs old to cut up your iPad for some art project. “
How about they print what they see on the iPad on an inkjet printer instead of cutting up the iPad?
And can an art catalog zoom in on a detail in a piece of art? Not unless the catalog authors thought of it ahead of time. C’mon, let your imagination run free.