Past and Future of Books

How has reading changed for me?

     I learned to read in the mid-1980s and grew to love books shortly thereafter.  Perhaps “love” isn’t the right word ... obsession might be more accurate.  I wanted to read EVERYTHING, and I adored the books I owned.  I alphabetized my bookshelves.  My sister, five years older than me, would complain to my parents that I was reading her books without asking first.  I would lay on the sofa in our living room and read until the back of my head went numb from resting it on the armrest too long, and my mom would grow increasingly enraged at my repeated broken promises to do my chores “as soon as I finish this chapter!”  My favorite part of our annual family camping vacation was our trip to the bookstore beforehand when I got to choose books to read on the trip.  (Perhaps appropriately, these were usually “Choose Your Own Adventure.”  The adventure I chose was to read in the camper instead of enjoying the great outdoors and socializing with my family.  That piece of my personality, at least, hasn’t changed in my adulthood.)

     I started to fall out of love with reading around my junior year of high school, maybe as I grew jaded by the chore of increasingly difficult reading assignments.  I still liked reading for pleasure, but as assignments evolved from the “read a book and write a summary” of elementary, junior high, and even early high school, to “read this specific book and analyze it using this specific method we learned about in class this week,” the pleasure started to wane.  As if that weren’t enough to kill my reading spirit, internet was suddenly a thing – chat rooms!  AIM!  Online euchre games! – and reading fell by the wayside.  Internet didn’t go away, and my reading habits didn’t return, at least not for a long while.

     When I rediscovered the joy of reading (embarrassingly recently), options had expanded.  The print books of my childhood remained, but there were also books on CD (RIP books on tape), e-books, and e-audio.  Graphic novels were cool again, even for grownups.  Nowadays I average about a book per week of reading, and I am most often doing so with print format or e-audio.  I love the feeling of having a book in my hands, turning the pages, and seeing my progress as the bookmark creeps closer to the end.  (This has a lot to do with nostalgia, I’m sure.  If I’d fallen in love with reading a decade or two later and grown up with a tablet in my hands, I imagine e-books would be my go-to reading method.)  If I’m listening to an audio book (which I do often – it’s so easy to knock out a chapter or two on my commute or while I’m washing dishes!) e-audio is my preference because I can play it with my smartphone wherever I am and don’t have to worry about scratching CDs or damaging a bulky plastic case, and I don’t have to remember what track I stopped on because my phone will start up the story right where I left off last time I listened.

[Below is a cartoon from Grant Snider that I saw recently, and I think it's very appropriate for this post.]

The Future of Books and Reading

     Reading, I am confident, isn’t going away.  Print books, however, will eventually fall out of favor, but not for a long while.  E-books are inexpensive to produce and convenient to store and carry around and read, and plenty of people already love them, so they’re here to stay, but there are still too many people of my generation and older who will keep buying print for publishers to stop producing them any time soon.  And surely, just as some members of younger generations will pay a premium to buy their music on vinyl, there must be some who will always prefer the retro feel of print, even when cheaper electronic versions are increasingly the norm.

     Libraries, too, will continue to play their part in our reading habits.  Perhaps in the future when print is finally waning, libraries will look different from what they do now – it will be interesting to see what they do with all that space! – but people will still go to them (virtually, if not physically) to borrow electronic book formats.  When this day comes, I imagine libraries will function more as community, cultural, and education centers, and perhaps circulating more household items, like the cake pans and tools trending now.