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.]
[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.
Hi Anna! Great post! I enjoyed reading about your booky childhood - it's similar to mine. My mom was always yelling at me to "get your nose out of that book!", "Go outside and play!", "Stop reading and look out the window!" Ah yes. The good ol' days. My daughter would rather chew off her own arm than pick up a book and (gasp!) actually read the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteI had convinced myself that the generation coming up would render print obsolete, but I'd forgotten about their love of RETRO. My daughter has an app on her phone that actually makes those amazing photos she can get with an iphone look like photos from a disposable camera from the '90s, complete with a date stamp! Also, there's another app that makes videos taken with the iphone look like those wiggly lined camcorder videos from the 80s! I was gobsmacked!! Anyway, you're right, there will always be some print books floating around, to keep in touch with the past, if anything!
Anyway, this was a fun class! It made me decide that I really want to go into Adult Services for sure. I hope you have a great summer and an amazing future!
Fantastic prompt response! I love that you shared your journey and I LOVE the cartoon you included!! Full points!
ReplyDelete