Save the books!
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Now we’re talking. About reading…
President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, will preside over the ninth National Book Festival, to be held on the National Mall on Saturday, Sept. 26.
The daylong event celebrates the joys of reading and literacy.
Participants can meet and hear from about 70 award-winning authors, poets and illustrators, and take part in a variety of activities.
The festival is organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress and is free and open to the public.
Former first lady Laura Bush inaugurated the festival in 2001, modeling it after a similar event she held as first lady of Texas.
But she was a librarian, after all, and had a great love of books. Now we’re turning to Kindle and other electronic means of delivering content more and more and…
Wait….this AP piece doesn’t say anything about celebrating the joy of bound volumes of books you hold in your hands and turn the pages and mark up the margins and keep on your shelves cluttered with all your other favorites over time.
Pope Benedict, an ardent reader and prolific writer, calls his books his “friends”. Many of us share the feeling, and the submission to a weakness when in a bookstore on a mission to find one thing, causes us to instinctively drift from shelf to shelf, distracted in a time-suspended exploration of so many possible discoveries.
Sorry, I digress. Good news is that this is sponsored by the Library of Congress. What would they be without books?
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I love books, but I’m also keen about new ways of delivering book content. Latest read on my iPhone? G.K. Chesterton’s “Heretics.”
eading on a Kindle or an iPhone or another e-reader may seem radical, but so was the paperback book in the early 20th century, and books themselves, especially after Gutenberg revolutionized the way in which books were made.
I would be interested to know what effects, if any, online book reading has on learning, memory, processing, and so forth. So much of our lives are centered on a computer screen these days, and technology is too young to predict long term effects, but I wonder sometimes how the mind, especially a child’s mind, is able to sort important information from more liesurely information, when so much is wrapped up on this tiny little screen. There is something about holding a nicely bound hardcover book that not only takes one on the journey you describe but also instills a sense of ownership and responsiblity to the information one is receiving.
Also, if we were to switch entirely to Kindle reading, there would be no need for bookstores, making those jobs obsolete. Kinda like the self-checkout aisles at grocery stores…everytime I pass one I think, ‘there’s one less job in our hurting job market.’