Far from killing off the physical page, the rise of ebooks has enhanced our understanding of the written word and the people around it, says Gaby Wood in the Telegraph.
From the article...
Recent news that sales of printed books have plummeted in almost all markets across the world, while in the UK sales of ebooks have soared, comes on the heels of Jonathan Franzen’s alarming pronouncement at the Hay Festival Cartagena that ebooks are damaging society. But in the United States, sales of digital books have slowed. To anyone trying to read the runes of this fairly new market, it seems like a case of hearing the bad news before the bad news: either printed books are dead, or no one is reading at all.
I don’t think either of those things is true. Reading has always been extremely personal – people are fast or slow, immersive, digressive or meticulous, they like dog-eared paperbacks or first editions. There is no end to the range of preferences, and in many ways the digital revolution has merely added to a repertoire that has existed since the practice began. My objection to Franzen’s comment is that there is very little point in lumping all digital forms of reading together. Now that we’re a little way in to the phenomenon, it should be possible to give up the basic Luddite-versus-technophile argument, and see that while some innovations are truly groundbreaking, others are simply not good enough.
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