blogmarch

This week has been full of big news about books and print media.  Oprah loves Kindle, and maybe so will Lindsay, Google settled it’s copyright lawsuits with various publishers, and the Christian Science Monitor will no longer offer print versions of its newspaper during the week.  All of this has been making me think about the way books, and printed reading material in general, are evolving.  Also about how readers are evolving.  Some of the things I have been reading lament the fact that people are reading less, and that their attention spans aren’t able to handle whole books anymore.  I wonder if this is true.  Everyone I know still reads books.  My 21 year-old neice is the most “continually computing” person I know–Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, texting, IMing–she does all of it, sometimes all at once (or so it seems).  But at the end of the day, before she goes to sleep, she reads books.  She and my sister choose titles to read and discuss together.  My husband, a web programmer and computer-obsessed freak, still manages to read an average of two books a week, the same as he did when we first met.

So I wonder, are we reading less, or is the way we are reading changing?  When Lindsay pointed out the features of the Kindle, she mentions being able to make notes in the margins, ask online “reference” people questions, look up words in the dictionary.  Doing all of this may make the reader’s attention span wander, but what a way to wander!  It seems like the features would only enhance the reading experience.  There are so many times that I mean to look a word up, but don’t because I don’t want to get up.  Lindsay also discusses how great a Kindle would be to keep kids engaged.  I agree.  In a magazine my six-year old’s teacher sent home there is an article “The Future of Literacy.”  Various experts discuss technology and teaching.  One of the panelists, Bob Stein, of the Institute for the Future of the Book, is asked about how reading is changing.   His reply is that now, if a child is reading, s/he will put down the book, and go to the book’s website, look at forums and maybe respond, then return to the book.  Then, s/he will put the book down again and Google some query about the author.  This kind of interactivity makes reading even more exciting and so much more informative than it used to be.

I see how exciting this kind of interactiviy can be as I teach my six year old.  Last week, we were looking at one of her Halloween books, and there was a cartoony picture of Frankenstein.  She asked about the inevitable push-pin looking things in his neck.  She wanted to know if Frankenstein was a monster. I started to explain about how he is kind of a monster, but kind of sad, too, because he has human feelings inside a monstrous body made up of dead body parts and gears and things.    I asked if she wanted to see other pictures, so we put the book down and went to Google Images (she is a six year-old who has always liked morbid stuff).  Then we went to look for information on Wikipedia about Frankenstein.  Then we printed out Frankenstein coloring pages.    Then I decided that I should get out our copy of Mary Shelley’s original story for me to read again.  Reading begat technology begat more reading.  We both had a great, interactive Frankenstein experience, as fractured and interrupted as it was.   And we both came away with a more well-rounded experience.  Google claims, with its book digitization program, that it wants to provide access to all of the world’s information.  Every time I read that, it sounds so exciting.  I realize this is the feeling I have every time my daughter and I look things up.  It really feels that between all of the books in the world and all of the technology, that we really do have access to all of the world’s information.