A famous Anton Chekhov story has a young, boisterous lawyer self-imprisoned to win a bet of two million rubles and spends fifteen years in solitary confinement! He achieves this impossible task with the help of books. He reads incessantly, voraciously, and variously. At the end, he goes as a free man, full of the most enchanting knowledge of everything worth acquiring, experiencing, and living for.
Books are an elixir. Reading them is going on a word-voyage to transcend notions.
As times have changed, so has reading. The quaint, smell of yellowing paperbacks or leathery hard bounds has been replaced with toughened glass devices, displaying backlit, well-appointed arrays of sentences, plots, and tales. Meet the e-reader. The innocuous-looking device has devoured entire tomes, and has the appetite for more, with 5G clearance in the coming future.
The word is Digital Reading. On this National Reading Day, let us scan the perimeter for new trends, norms, invents, and offerings in the reading habit.
What’s Trending Digitally
Various things.
For Entertainment it is
- Yahoo! Sports: 125,000,000 (Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors)
- ESPN: 80,000,000 (Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors)
Sports news sites like
- Youtube.Com. 1682800000. Youtube.Com
- Imdb.Com. 377500000. Imdb.Com
Technology is being read more, with Forbes, Wired (“the Rolling Stone” of technology), TechCrunch website, reaching 12 million visitors per month. Globally, people are reading The Washington Post, The Verge, The Guardian, BBC and Fortune, on-line.
Books are the best companions we can have and reading, the best pursuit. National Reading Day is an event to be celebrated multifariously, across the nation.
– Meghana Ahuja
Team Lead -Marketing, MOURI Tech
Digital reading by itself is highly entertaining. Platforms like Kindle, Scribd, Kobo, Bluefire Reader are popular. E-readers have relieved students of their dead-weight satchels. It is more practicable to work with, and content is editable. Digital texts encourage skimming and keyword seeking. One theory is that many readers use this method to manage information overload.
Peek into the Past: Ancient-most Reading Tablets
Epic of Gilgamesh (of Nineveh, city in modern day Iraq) on a clay tablet
A Babylonian Limestone Cuneiform Tablet
Digital readers: The Modern-day best buddies of reading!
Digital Reading Today: EdTech
Digital reading today, has a sibling; Digital (Technology) Education; EdTech for short. As of June 2022, India has a total of five Edtech unicorns of the 32 worldwide, (global-edtech.com/edtech-unicorns-2022/). The ask from these organizations is usually simple: offering private tuition, homework and/or revision support. The Indian EdTech industry alone is pegged at many billions of US dollars! The COVID atmosphere has fueled demand and hundred percent FDI approval from the government is awaited by this sector to grow bigger.
Is it Gender-biased?
Mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world are reading more print books, e-books, and audiobooks than ever before. However, men are seemingly less involved, compared to women. Deloitte Global predicts this trend to continue.
Cities and Countryside: Divided Digitally?
The digital divide between India’s rural and urban areas is evident. Services such as online classrooms, could not be conducted well in Covid times, as only 15% of homes in villages were and still are connected to the internet. In cities, 42% have Internet access. So digital reading needs impetus.
One for P N Panicker!
India celebrates National Reading Day to honor P N Panicker, the founding father of the Literacy Movement in India.
Panicker travelled extensively thru India, making an overwhelming effort to bring the ordinary masses closer to books. Recognizing this, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded his organization the prestigious ‘Krupsakaya Award’ in 1975. To sum up, let us not forget, Digital reading has got you here; Even to this page. Happy reading.
References:
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234264060_The_Impact_of_Internet_and_Digital_Media_on_Reading_Habit
- acrl.ala.org/IS/wp-content/uploads/Tips-and-Trends-Sp18.pdf
- www.stateofdigitalpublishing.com/features/digital-publish…
- https://builtin.com/edtech
- www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.637776/full
