I remember World Book Day fondly as a child. We got
a £1 book token, and off I went to WH Smiths to get my book, which was usually
a brilliant Roald Dahl one. Now, at the age of 25, my over-riding memories of
World Book Day are from when I was around 7 or 8, in a world in which if you
wanted to know about a moment in history, details of a television series, or
more about a musician, you looked in a book; hours were spent in the library
looking up information on World War II, for example, first in an encyclopaedia,
then a book on battles of note, taking you to specialist books on WWII. Now, we
could find this information in 3 minutes on the internet, the very tool you are
using to read this now.
How do children of this so-called “digital
generation” still relate to books? I turned 13 when we got our first computer
with internet, which was a little behind some other people, but by that point
my relationship with books growing up was formed and if there had been a Kindle
or e-book around then, I wouldn’t have been swayed. I think that relationship
is very important growing up, not only through the process of learning to read,
but the acts of taking books out of the library, the sheer size of some of the
pictures books I remember looking at with my mum (probably smaller than A3, but
that seemed substantial at age 6), and the emotional bond with those books. I
still have many of the books I read as a child, as does my mum. I can’t imagine
a situation where you would ask someone if they still have the books they read
as a child and they respond to the tune of “no, all I read was on a Kindle/computer”,
so they have no physical objects: that to me would be a BIG chunk of your
childhood missing.
So, in this world, is the era of the book (or at
least, printed word) dead? In my photography degree that’s coming to an end in
June, the internet has been an invaluable tool in researching. If I need to
know what year Ansel Adams took the famous photograph of Mirror Lake in
Yosemite or the director of photography for the James Bond film Moonraker, I could find out both answers
in the time it’s taken you to read this post so far.
However, to me, this only ever feels like the “prelude”
to the research, which then takes place in books. Not only is there the
vernacular of books (the relationship of typography and layout with the page,
and in terms of photography books, the relationship of an image to the one on
the opposite page and the ensuing narratives etc.) which you simply don’t get
from scrolling down a page, but also there’s scientific studies that have
proven that your mind takes in (and more importantly, remembers) information
better on a printed page than a computer screen.
The digital world does some things very well, but
books can’t die because the digital “replacements” are just imitations, and not
convincing ones at that (I remember one of the adverts for a Kindle showed a
tanned woman on the beach having a great time reading her Kindle, because
apparently sand in a book is infinitely more trip-spoiling than in the nooks
and crannies of an electronic device). In the music world, we were being
convinced that iPods were the future of music: I know personally of several
people whose CD collection was their life, and they downloaded the lot to their
iPod and sold them (usually at a tenth of what they paid for them). About 3
years ago, my local well-known music store jettisoned half its CD racks in
favour of an iPod section, only to nearly go under: last year they had a vinyl
section again and vinyl has hit a sales high not reached since 1996 (including Pink
Floyd’s latest record, The Endless River,
being the fastest selling record since 1997): the message here? People will
always come back to the real thing.
Fifty Shades
of Grey,
while may be remembered more as the film version, showed that the power of a
book is still alive and kicking. While arguably not quite a groundbreaking
future classic on par with To Kill a Mockingbird,
The War of the Worlds or even On
The Road, it shows that in a digital world, it’s still a book (whether you
were a fan or not) that engaged with people, got them talking and made
newspaper and chat show fodder for several months after it’s release.
This is why I believe the book will never die, and
that the Kindle and e-book will be a passing phase and something we look back
on in years to come with a cynical smile. Each generation has one of these
moments; for my parents it was the 8-track cassette in the late 70s, and for me
it was the “wonders” of w@p internet on your phone, circa 2003. If either of
those things has made you pause and think either “what is that?” or “Oh ... I
remember having/hearing about that”, then remember that feeling, because that’s
surely how your son or daughter will react to you mentioning your beach-damaged
Kindle in 20 years time.
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