The day has come. The day where I ditch flipping the pages for flicking the screen. Highlighters have been replaced with the tap of a finger to mark my place.
Yep. I am now an e-reader convert.
I was always one of those people, a purist if you will, that refused to get on the e-reader wagon. I considered them a waste of money (“It’s not quite a computer, and a little obnoxious for a book – what a waste.”), but more than anything I saw the rise of the digital book trend to be an end of the experience one has when reading.
You see, reading is so much more to me than the flip of a page. It’s a break from the norm, a chance to escape the everyday, and being that being on the Internet constantly is almost essential for my line of work, it’s always been nice to close the laptop and pick up a book.
Was it not for my Kindle Fire Christmas present this past year, I can pretty much guarantee you I’d still be arguing that which I have above. That books are king, the e-reading business is going to kill off the already dying printing industry, we’re all becoming much too dependent on technology, yadda yadda. But now that I am the owner of one of these devil devices, I can tell you that having an e-reader doesn’t really affect any of the aforementioned arguments.
Sure, the printing industry is suffering quite a bit, but I hold out hope that things will take a turn for the better. My marketing instincts always steer my advice to clients and non- alike that an integrated marketing approach will help not only save the industry from going under, but keep it treading water and, eventually, more than stay afloat. Having a support system that encourages both online and offline customers will bring more revenue to the printing sector, and costs will be cut thanks to having a wider online audience. That may be a somewhat naive comment to make, but one must recognize there is value in that thinking.
And as for the argument of technology taking over, well, yes, there are more and more devices each day that take us away from traditional print, from writing our thoughts out and directing them towards the keyboard instead. However, what technology is helping us achieve should justify our greater adoption of tech devices. In this case, I may be shying away from print and finding myself clinging to the Kindle Fire more, but that’s just it – I am reading more than ever.
There are reports out there that due to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, whatevz.com (not a network, but I felt another “yadda” would cheapen this post), have shortened our attention spans so much that we can’t stand to read something for more than a few minutes. Online video views are higher than ever, but people don’t particularly like to watch anything longer than 1-2 minutes. I work in social media – I am absolutely one of those people I’ve just described. But now I have access to a mini-library in the form of a portable tablet, and I’ll tell you, I find myself getting lost in the virtual pages for hours at a time. I am now skipping catching up on Hulu or continuing on my hunt for the world’s next best animated GIF to see what Peeta Mellark is up to, or pondering which I wish I’d known when I was 20. It may not be the preferred medium of college professors, authors, heads of The New York Times, but no one can knock the end result. E-readers can very well get us back into books. How can you be against that?
I am an e-reader convert.
Why aren’t you?
Coffee & AV 