When comes to technology, we are seeing breakthroughs after breakthroughs and it is constantly advancing to a new level. However, after an increase on the creation of digital books, many people are concerned about what kind of effect this will have on their reading. As you know, reading is very important in life, because it is the way in which we educate ourselves, and even doing basic things requires reading. The famous American author Garrison Keillor once said, a “book is a gift you can open again and again.”
In that case, I am creating a gift in the form of essay to enlighten readers on my view of online reading. After reading two well researched articles by David Ulin, Ann My Thal, and looking at my experience with digital reading, I found out digital books are very detrimental in our reading. I believe e-readers are damaging our interest and our ability to read.
Online reading is kidnapping our interest in reading. Let’s looks at a person whose online reading destroyed his love of reading. David Ulin published an article, “The Lost Art of Reading” in August 9, 2009 that talked about the detrimental side of online reading based on his life experience. David had “adored” books from his childhood to most of his adult life; he was the person that read all time in school, on weekends, at camps and the list goes on. In the article, he specifies the importance of reading in life and he said in reading “we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being.”
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Unfortunately, as time went on, he started to read from the computer for work and he also got hooked on social media like many of us living in this era of the twenty-first century. Regularly reading digitally changed him completely. He noticed how his interest in reading was “fading away” fast, because whenever he tried to read; now he gets distracted with e-mails and looking at things on the internet. If I look at this particular story and the other stories I am reading currently on this topic, I am seeing most people are having the same problems with reading as the author of the article. Online reading will change you to a person without concentration and focus.
When it comes to comparing two things, if the bad out weights the good then that good thing becomes bad. If we look at these two viewpoints about hard copy books and digital books to see which one is good and which one is bad, then we would be able to know how digital reading is affecting readers. “Does a Book by Any Other Platform Still Smell as Sweet?” was article that was published on Nov 15, 2010 by Ann My Thal. We are currently at a time when everything is getting revolutionized by technology; digital books have raised a lot concerns between people.
However, the concern in digital books are not new, because researchers have been studying it since the 1980’s, but now as we see more and more online books more and more people are asking the question of is it beneficial or is it not. Author Thal brought an interesting idea from a research in her article, which talked about the benefits of online reading and how it’s giving our kids many interesting ways that they can learn to read. In this study, Thal indicated that online reading gives kids the ability to “manipulate letters,” and given kids fun ways that they can interact with what they are reading which will increase the kids interest in reading.
However, I am seeing many other studies that were conducted like the one the Kaiser Family Foundation has done in 2010. In their study, they found a 7% drop on young people’s reading. When I compare these two studies, I believe the results from the Kaiser Family Foundation study out weight the first study. There is good and bad with everything in life, but when it comes to the comparison of hard copy books and digital books, hard copy books are the way to go when comes to the benefits of reading.
Everyone has their own experiences when it comes to reading. The journey I went through to get to where I am now took a long time. I started to learn English at age of 13 and that is when my reading journey started. At the beginning, my reading was not to the level where I could understand what I was reading until the following year. That was when I started to set a goal to improve my English to the level where my classmates were at that time. I decided to get a book to read, English to Somali dictionary, and a notebook. For two consecutive years I would go to my room after school where I started to read and learn the words I didn’t know. As time went on, my interest in reading grew, because I didn’t usually sit down to read for hours in my native tongue before.
I read constantly until my sophomore year in high school; in the middle of that year, I got a phone for the first time. I used to see kids reading on their phones in English class whenever we had to read our outside novels, so since I got a phone I started to become one of them. Everything went great that whole year and I was reading as usual; nothing changed. However, my junior year I started to get hooked on Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and I started to use Nooks for reading. That year my interest in reading went down and so did my concentration on any reading. Now it is really a pain for me to sit down and read for a long time, like how I used to in middle school. I believe the access to social media and online reading damaged my overall interest in reading.
Digital books kill interest and the ability to read. I did not take my stand without reading many different articles about the benefits and the problems with digital books. The two articles, “The Lost Art of Reading” and “Does a Book by Any Other Platform Still Smell as Sweet?” that I used in this essay helped me talk about both sides of this argument. In addition, I have my personal experience on how digital books have affected my interest and my ability to read. With more and more people seeing the detrimental side of electronic books, I am hoping that concern will lead back to a trend of reading hard copy books.
