One of the biggest impacts that the online publishing world has given me is the chance to access texts I wouldn't normally have a chance to.
First, simply for economic reasons, I can't buy all the books I want, nor would I have the space for them in my tiny NYC apartment.
Next, the convenience of immediate access and portability has led me to Guttenberg Project many times. I have used this site for many of the books I've had to read from my literature classes. Guttenberg has a great collection of literature in various file formats and even audio books. This is an invaluable resource for someone who enjoys literature. Now, I stil enjoy reading an actual book and holding it in my hands. If your are holding a paper copy of a book you don't have to worry about battery life, or file formats. Of course, somehow returning to your favorite book on a screen does not have the same effect for me, yet. It is only those same those dog eared pagesof my favorite books that have witnessed the joy and even tears I have felt while reading them, not a screen or a digital file.
Clearly e-books are taking over as Amazon's latest reports states, but is there a downside to this? Now that I have been in this Digital Literacies class for a few weeks, I believe there isn't a downside to e-books at all.People are just changing the way they read, just like the way people travel has. One hundred years ago people used horses and trains and now most people fly if they need to travel far. People clearly read but in a different format now, if anything maybe people can read more just like people can travel faster, and more frequently as a result of air travel. Moreover, as the peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa says, " literature has been, and will continue to be, as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of human experience through which human beings may recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how different their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal circumstances. ” a common denominator that I believe is carried into digital reading, don't you think?
Good points, Bertha. Reading formats are always driven by economic realities, so all those commodities that we understand to be natural or organic are not. We are certainly in a moment of change.
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