FUTURE OF PRINTED BOOKS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

 

Books in olden days played a major part in human development and knowledge. Gone are those days when we penned down to write and read books. The digital era has changed our habits of reading books and involving ourselves into the world of comics and fictions. The consumption of cyberspace has created a number of transformations on readers.

Today, most of the libraries are digitalized which once had books piled up for the readers. Digitalized e-book reading facilities and books on CD’s are on move today. Also few book lovers attitudes have changed and they do not impel themselves to rush and buy a book once it gets published. Rather, they sit back and wait to download the book online in pdf format for free and read them on their PC’s. 

Also, the arrival of tablets and e-readers does not mean people read less; it is more likely they will read more, as access to content has become so much easier and cheaper. New technologies are delivering the same product in a different format and different ways, for a fraction of the cost. Also, digital technologies don’t have those high costs as compared to that of book publishing companies and they therefore can deliver the product significantly cheaper. Cory Pressman, who is the founder of Exprima Media, a software design and development firm based in Portland, has been writing some incredibly interesting blog posts about how the digital book age is reviving writing and reading conventions from our distant past. When asked about the digital reading methods, he said, “Reading is an old and varied behavior, and the new digital reading patterns, values, and assumptions with which we are familiar are themselves relatively new.”

A trend has developed among the younger generations today where they proudly say that they are e-readers. This trend on a positive side gives them a lot of exposure and opportunity to explore and choose from varied options of digital book available instead of going to a library and choosing them. Thus it is time consuming. On the contrary, there are health issues in it. Upon continuous reading from monitors or tablets, heat generated from these gadgets is hazardous to health and also continuous looking and reading from screens and monitors might strain our eyes.

Another major advantage of digital and e-learning is that, it gives us the access to external pages and extra information through links. While reading an article or a book, it takes us though the background of the story then and there necessary via links to external pages. This eases our work to search and understand the background and helps us move smoothly throughout our reading. Also the references and bibliography provided on the article enables the readers to go to the actual reference page and read the content to understand it deeper.

Apart from these, there are many differences between browsing real books with physical presence in a real bookstore as compared with endless scrolling through subject categories of two-dimensional cover illos. Some on-line sellers allow you to open a page of contents or even to browse a few specimen pages. Others merely offer you one version or another of back cover blurb or worse.

Though the essence of book industry has a good future, the future “books” are predicted to be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video. They’ll be enhanced with social bookmarking, online dating, and alerts from geo-networking apps. The future youth generation, though will be more eager to read will prefer audio books or digital notebooks to read.

A GRUESOME SACRIFICE

 

She was decorated… She wore ornaments… She had variety of foods kept before her to munch from… She was overwhelmed… But she never knew this would be the last moment in her life.

In the Hindu folklore, killing animals in the name of fallacy is common. Deep interior in the state of Karnataka lies Sandur known for its rich iron and manganese ore mines in the district of Bellary. During a visit to report on mining, I had a good rapport with the villagers around. I learnt a lot about their lifestyle, food habits, the main occupation and their major source of income.

It was a Sunday morning when I remembered to attend a grand temple function that evening as invited by the villagers. I always love to cover religious and cultural beats. The village was lit with festive mood. People from nearby districts were also there to pay their respects to 'Muniamma’ who was the presiding deity there. She was worshipped as goddess of security, safety and prosperity. The huge idol of the goddess was given due respects, decorated with garlands and people offered food, fruits, milk and sweets which will later be distributed to others as prasaad.

I stood in a corner closely observing their culture when hundreds of villagers ran to welcome the village head who had a huge sickle in one hand and was pulling a cow by a rope on the other. Within seconds, the respects turned to the cow. She had huge varieties of food to choose from. Drums rolling and ladies screaming, the pooja started. The cow was taken inside a hut and moments later, the head of the village came out of the hut. Something was bizarre. For a second, I did not realize what it was. He had the same sickle in one hand but was dipped in blood and drops flowing down from the sharp edge of it.

On the other hand was the cow. This time it was not pulled by the rope. It was just the head of the cow and the body of her came behind carried by another man. Blood gushing from the cow’s head, the village leader kept the head of the cow in front of the deity and shouted his prayers offering the meat to the goddess. Stunned by their culture and superstitions, I quietly moved away from that place.

On my way back were a herd of cows grazing not far from where the sacrifice happened. I was helpless to see the state of these cows who are so called the goddess of prosperity ‘Gomatha’ in Hindu mythology, living a life, fearing of when they will be slaughtered by these people in the name of god’s prasaad.