How we read

There’s this great article on how reading habits are gradually changing over the years. While I’m glad the Internet has now made it possible for me to access a wide variety of reading material at the touch of a button, it’s sad that experiencing a real book, for all its palpable fervor, is a diminishing custom.

I introduced Santosh to a news aggregator yesterday, ever since the Ahmedabad blasts squealed the ones in Bangalore…and he’s been hooked ever since. It’s just another evidence vindicating the many advantages of online reading viz-viz reading in print.

I see the line gradually blurring between the two as technology evolves faster than we can imagine. Japan already has a newspaper that closely mimics the conventional look and feel but whose ‘print’ is refreshed each morning, thanks to an embedded chip receiving wireless signals from the news publisher. Amazon’s Kindle is taking baby steps into abolishing the need for conventional print while the iPhone makes for a crude but functional reading device.

Maybe my books will fetch a fortune someday at the Sotheby’s!