It’s weird to see the need to advertise for books, but why is that? when was the last time you saw an ad on the Tv or whatever, for a printed book?
The library got me thinking with their valentines themed push to get people to pleasure read. It’s not that people don’t pleasure read anymore but the use of physical books has declined. It makes sense though, why carry around a big clunky book when a Kindle holds 500 books. With the digitization of print media we lose something culturally, because of the vast amount of text available at a moment to us on the internet we have become addicted to instant literary gratification.
Everyday before I go to classes I read a certain humor website that in many ways is like a magazine; they publish new articles almost everyday and hey they make me laugh. But whatever happened to actually subscribing to a magazine, well it doesn’t work out anymore. Personally I want a new article everyday ready and waiting online when I get up I don’t have the time to wait around for a weekly or monthly magazine subscription.
So for the sake of printed books, go read something that has turnable pages, instead of on a screen.
As much as I like print sources, I wonder how much culture we are really losing. After all, the content of the books stays the same whether they are on paper or screen. Although, you do have a point: we have come to expect instant gratification. Our reading habits, too, are something of wanting to get through a book quickly to move on to something else.
While mediums like kindles do make it much easier for us to read new material daily, there is nothing quite like holding the physical copy of a text and flipping through the pages. I think a good point was made in that we now expect instant gratification. Although I prefer reading books and magazines to texts on a screen, the words do remain the same and more often than not, it is easier to read off a screen. I think we often forget that there was once a time where people couldn’t just search for material to read instantly.