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What Have You Read Lately?
by Alex Mendelsohn
I have fond memories of my grade school library. It's been said the sense of smell keenly triggers nostalgia, and I agree. I recall a fragrant blend of ink and wood and paper in that library room. That unique smell lingers in my mind to this day.
What a joy when I discovered that I could roam the school library and borrow any book that tickled my fancy. From that day to this, I still enjoy visiting libraries. I support my local library with an annual personal donation, and I always find time in my busy schedule for recreational reading.
Yes, I will admit I'm a couch potato. My wife often finds me on there with my nose buried in a book. But this lethargy came in handy once when I clinched a job when the personnel manager asked me during an interview what books I had read in the past six months.
Fewer People Read
Unfortunately, studies reveal that, in general, fewer people are reading books these days, although the recession has breathed some new life into libraries. A National Endowment for the Arts study shows that about half of all Americans age 18 to 24 read absolutely no books! The steepest rate of decline (28%) occurred in the youngest age groups. No wonder student reading comprehension skills in the US are in the tank. Maybe that’s why American engineers have such a hard time when it comes to generating documentation.
I digress. To its credit, Sony is stepping up to the plate to address the reading problem, and it's doing it in a contemporary high-tech way. Sure, Sony wants to sell product, but it's Reader Revolution pitch is nonetheless a great way to try and get kids to read.
As part of Sony’s Reader Revolution thrust, David Farrow, a dyslexic student suffering from attention deficit disorder, is running a digital e-book reading marathon. Regardless of his dual handicap, Farrow is a speed-reader. For each page he reads, Sony is going to donate an e-book library of classics.
The company pledges to hand out over 15 million e-book classics to US schools under the Reader Revolution program. In a related development, Google is now offering 500,000 scanned public-domain book titles for presentation on Sony Reader e-book platforms. The $350 Sony Reader uses a new EPUB (electronic publication) format that fits the Reader e-book's petite screen. By the way, the titles Google is offering are no longer protected by copyright.
This move by Google comes on the heels of Amazon's mildly successful Kindle e-book. Amazon offers Kindle users (a.k.a. old fashioned readers) 600,000 scanned titles, all published prior to 1923. Unlike the Google-Sony EPUB documents, Amazon's scans are available in the popular .PDF (Portable Document Format) file format, or what I used to know as a Postscript Description File. Incidentally, while it was proprietary for many years, the .PDF format is now an open ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard (ISO 32000-1:2008).
Interestingly enough, Sony EPUB files can be converted to a format readable by a $360 Kindle machine. If you're a Kindle user you can link to Amazon's e-book store. There you'll find 245,000 titles, but if you desire to get a book into a Sony Reader, you have to download it into your PC. You then connect your Sony Reader EPUB machine to the PC to poke the Amazon file into the Reader.
While all of this is well and good, (although it seems like a lot of work), it occurs to me that a generation of e-book users may never experience the heady whiff of paper and bindings and sweat that I loved so much as a boy in my school library. Worse, e-book readers may miss the congenial community library atmosphere.
Call me a Luddite, as I have no Blackberry, cellphone, iPOD or iPhone (I do have a first-generation Rocket e-book, circa 1999, in my collection). The hundreds of dollars that an e-book costs would go a long way to support a neighborhood library. Not having any of this wireless stuff is my choice. For the rest of the world, e-books will hopefully inspire reading as a pastime, which is a good thing.
What have you read lately? Do you think e-books are viable? Write me at amm at en-genius dot net, or post your comments on our blog.
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