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.