I read with interest people's opinions of e-readers. Not having ever seen one in action, what I don't quite understand is whether you actually see a cover or are catapulted straight into the page.
It all seems at odds with what I hear about the emerging generation. Not even emerging generation, I hear it from my contemporaries. That their concentration is showing grasshopper tendencies the further we hop down the information super highway. The average time people spend at a website is 60 seconds. That's not long. Even with television people probably enjoy channel zapping more than staying fixed on an actual programme.
Which leads me to question whether the e-reader has a long lifespan. It is probably aimed at people like my brother. He positively devours books. Last summer at the parco on the shores of Lake Como, I found him reading a book on his mobile phone. That is truly a sign of a readaholic.
He is the upper side of 50. I wonder whether there will be many people interested in e-readers below the age of 30. I might be wrong, but common sense tells me not. If we can only spend 60 seconds stopping at a website, why would we spend hours in front of a screen reading a book.
And this blog, dear reader, is probably already far too long.
1 comment:
Two words. Harry Potter. As in Harry Potter and the Enormous Tome of Words, Harry Potter and the Pain of Lower Back Injury and Harry Potter and the Osteopath's Waiting Room.
It's probably non-fictio such as reference that will suffer more from the (alleged) decrease in attention spans. I know if I can't find the answer to a simple factual question (say, the population of Ecuador, the first name of von Ribbentrop or the date of the battle of Bosworth) within a few seconds, I get ridiculously impatient. A few years I'd have been happy to spend several minutes hunting through books for the information. I might even have been willing to make a trip to the library. Of course, the corollary is that I'd only bother to looks something up when I really wanted to know, whereas now I constantly Google on a whim and if it doesn't work I simply allow my butterly mind to flit on to the next pretty flower without a second thought.
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