My friends and I like to debate the future of books and reading. (For us, this has more appeal than politics or football.) There are the pro-e-readers in the group who are looking to carry half of their libraries in their smart phones and there are the anti e-readers who are happiest with the traditional paper pages in their hand. I enjoy the debates but until recently I believed the only difference between traditional and electronic books was the carrying case. After all, they were both just printed words on a flat surface, right? Nope. When it comes to ebooks, words may be just the beginning. My favorite ereader has a nifty gadget: an incorporated dictionary that lets me highlight any word in the text I don’t know so the definition will pop up without me having to close the page. There’s an encyclopedia link there too. Very helpful. Now I’ve learned that someone has developed ebooks for little kids that have animated pictures mixed in with the text and links in the text (like my dictionary) that helps youngsters understand new words. Kids with the interactive and animated illustration books gained more in story understanding and vocabulary…
Printed text is like the wheel in some ways. It’s one of the first basic inventions, one that millions of others benefit from. Before printed text, reading was reserved for the few who, through luck or wealth, could get their hands on the labor-intensive, hand-printed texts. After Gutenberg, books became accessible to larger and larger pockets of people and more and more information became available because it was printed. Knowledge wasn’t lost after a sheepskin or papyrus disintegrated. Even the internet exists because we were able to amass and share knowledge through printed text. Reading has allowed us to transmit knowledge for a long time but, partly because it works so well, we didn’t really monkey around with the basic delivery system for years. We have now. As a kid, I heard about audiobooks but only as substitute for blind people who hadn’t mastered Braille. It was the 1990’s before I used them. We rented them for long car trips as an alternative to recorded music and conversation. Don’t ask me why but books about ocean disasters always seemed to accompany us on trips to the beach. (It’s probably a mistake to listen to A Perfect Storm or Jaws when…