My thoughts a b ou t R e a d i n g
When I was a child, I became interested in reading books on such subjects as politics, science, and the world because all these topics where present in my home. Every morning a newspaper arrived, and was placed on the table, accessible for everyone. Each month, additional magazines my parents subscribed too arrived, and if I walked into the home office, I found shelves of books on various matters. This how I began reading the newspaper, the magazines got me interested in a
variety of topics, and started to read books to understand more. I wonder, have we lost this natural way of discovering things these days? Now my daily newspaper is an online subscription, which I read on my smartphone, or tablet. The same is true for magazines. Regarding books, more and more books are eBooks, which only exists in my reader, or as ebub file in a folder of my computer. They are invisible to everyone beside me. They are digital ghosts, electronic binary phantoms, only observable through modern gadgetry.
Regarding the books, I have to admit, even for me, it is hard to keep an overview of what exists in my eBook library, and it is way harder to discover stuff than it is standing in front of a bookshelf, grabbing one, opening it, flicking through some random pages, reading a few sentences, picking up the next one, and so on, until something grabs you, a magical sentence, a single word… then hours later you look up and realise its dark, the day has gone, and you are hungry. I wonder what this change means for our children? How will they discover all the amazing and interesting things I did? How will they become interested in news, science, the world, and reading in general?
Björn Schießle
