Palmer Trinity School

PER SPEC T I V E S Reading in a Digital World Written by R U T H A N N E V O G E L , Librarian Great news! Your favorite author has just published a new book. Do you rush out to the bookstore or go online to order a copy? Or do you turn on your Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad or computer to download it in digital format. How we read has become as interesting a debate as what we read. Many surveys recently published suggest that most people still prefer old fashioned paper reading – at least for books. However, e-book and e-reader sales are increasing, following quickly behind online newspapers and magazines, which currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of trade book sales. A rising concern is that by discarding the physical book and turning to digital we are changing our perceptions of the texts. Think about the reading you did when you were in school. If you toted around and read War and Peace or Moby Dick, you certainly knew you had accomplished something. Paper books have a discernible weight and size and one can tell one's progress by simply 18 www.palmertrinity.org following the marching bookmark. An e-reader, in contrast, weighs the same no matter what you are reading and though some e-readers offer percentages or other progress indications, they are not as immediately recognizable as the physical bookmark. Much of reading is about geography – knowing where you are on the page and how far you have progressed though the book. A recent article in Scientific American magazine compared the turning of pages in a physical book to leaving a footprint on a hiking trail. Physical pages help us create a rhythm and form a coherent map of the text. As you click through the pages of a digital book, each new page replaces the last, erasing the footprints of your journey. Digital books, however, offer a huge convenience over their physical counterparts. You can carry as many books as you wish without adding any weight to your luggage. Just about any book is available to you anywhere you are, a real convenience when you are traveling. You can instantly look up definitions to words or switch over to a browser and look up some background information. A unique digital literary experience is to read a Shakespeare play on the iPad, flipping over to a dramatic performance of each scene after you read it. New books, magazines and newspapers are often being published with added digital features, allowing content to be added to the written word. However we choose to read, the most important factor for the future is that we do continue to read.

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