According to a Yougov poll over a million e-readers were sold over Christmas, making them more popular than the iPad for those living outside London, particularly among women & older folk. Most of them were Kindles,so my rcent first sighting of a Kindle on a rural bus was truly representative of a trend.
It is not really surprising that people prefer technology which provides them in a straightforward way with something they already love & understand.
Coincidentally, yesterday The Economist’s Babbage blog reported that, contrary to the received wisdom that we all (not just the young) have developed the attention span of a gnat now that we have the whizzy instant gratification of the web, there is a lot of enthusiasm out there for ‘long reads.’
This week, in a special series on Radio 4, The Written World (not Word, as the Times listings would have it), Melvyn Bragg has been looking at how writing, which, rather like computing, was originally developed for the rather boring functions of accountancy & record keeping, has shaped our intellectual history.
Although he stops short of the new worlds of computer words, concentrating on the book, there is no doubt that, far from damaging the spread of reading, these new electronic forms are bringing literacy & the joy of reading & learning to more people than have ever had that privilege in the past
