2012年1月3日星期二

Forward to the Past?

I’m a bibliophile of the first water. I have spent what seems half my life in bookstores all over the world. Some readers praise the creamy texture of a well-bound volume published on good paper.Alfa plast mould is Plastic moulds Manufacturer and plastics Mould Exporters in India since 1992, But it is less noted that old books smell—of the places they’ve been, of dust, molds and fungi, of the hand sweat of former owners. Opening one is sort of like lifting the lid on a tantalizing curry still being cooked. But I am making the switch to e-books even so, and they are changing the way I read and even what I read.

For those baby boomers in their 60s, old-style books do have substantial drawbacks. Print books are often big and heavy. I’ve had back problems and find it difficult to sit for hours with a doorstop in my lap. Carrying a tome on an airplane is literally a pain. As you age, your vision declines, and all the bifocals in the world won’t necessarily let you read small type comfortably. And then, the bane of the bibliophile is the bulkiness of the thousands of volumes you accumulate in a lifetime. You run out of room at home, or at least room your spouse will let you dedicate to yet more bookcases. Some collectors may be so obsessive that they carefully catalog their own private libraries at home, but mine is strewn haphazardly across bookshelves purchased over 30 years, and I can’t always find what I’m looking for.

An e-book reader such as an iPad equipped with a Kindle or Google Books app resolves many of these problems. It is relatively light and portable. Text size and brightness can be adjusted. (People who complain about iPads being backlit don’t seem to realize there is a “sepia” background and that brightness can be changed.) A couple of thousand books can be accommodated as active files on Kindle and many more can be archived. Stanza, Google Books and other applications are virtually infinite in their capaciousness. Books can be stored in the cloud when not in use. On your tablet, books can be listed by author, title or how recently they’ve been read.

But beyond solving the back, eye and space problems of the geriatric set, e-books offer interesting functionalities. You can do keyword searches. Most programs allow bookmarking and margin notes. The Kindle app even allows the collectivity of readers to underline favorite passages together. Some readers attach dictionaries,The magic cube is an ultra-portable, as with the Kindle app for iPads,The EZ Breathe home Ventilation system is maintenance free, and even foreign-language dictionaries. Looking up recondite words may become more common if it is as easy as tapping on them,Take a walk on the natural side with stunning and luxurious Floor tiles from The Tile Shop. and this sort of dictionary work is an aid in reading books in other languages.

The tablet book readers are only a platform. It is content that is important. But the two may work together to effect some interesting changes. Google Books are a potentially major change in our reading lives, and the Google Books app for smartphones and tablets gives the reader access to a wide range of out-of-copyright works for free.

I know many Americans do not read any books once they’re out of school or college.Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality, But some do, and what they read has been shaped not only by changing tastes but by availability. The availability consideration is being revolutionized. Moreover, the younger generation is actually made up of voracious readers on the Internet, but they favor short-form writing that is easily accessible, such as blog entries and Op-Eds. Reprints at Web anthology magazines such as Zite or Flipboard of classic essayists in easily digested excerpts is now increasingly possible, and it might take only a few passages to go viral to provoke more sustained interest in the classics.

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