The report in The Bookseller about more job losses at non-fiction publisher New Holland is symptomatic of the book publishing climate. Non-fiction (in other words information books which cover interests such as gardening, cookery, nature, dictionaries, maps, guides to language, etc, etc) is losing out to information on the internet. Browsing online comes much more naturally to the new generations than finding the information in a book.
The only trouble is that students probably just skim the surface of a subject and tend to home in on the information they need without being drawn into the webpage and the hinterland of the subject they are researching. If the average visit to a site is 60 seconds there is a lot of wasted time hopping from place to place and then retracing clicks to note what they found on a website many clicks before.
Hopefully this is just a glitch in the history of non-fiction publishing and somehow people will rediscover how useful a book with real rather than virtual pages is.
I even had a book published by New Holland. One that should be recommended to all screen slaves!
3 comments:
In my usual role as devil's advocate...
Why is it better to use "a book with real rather than virtual pages"? And what reason is there to think that the internet leads to more skimming and homing in on what you need? More often, it's accused of presenting endless distractions and overwhelming us with irrelevant info. If people in the internet age are better at skimming and homing in (though I see no reason to think that), isn't that a good thing?
Buon giorno Harry
Always nice to hear from you. I don't think I meant the skimming and homing in to be a good thing. I feel the internet lends itself more easily to matching the answer with the question without bothering about the understanding aspect.
Say you are taking a GCSE exam. If you want to do well, you look up the board of the examination. You find out exactly what the course covers. You learn exactly these things and you look at past questions. It is all out there on the internet. If you had good internet skills you (or your parents) would do this. Learn what you need to and get great results. Whether much understanding of the subject is involved is up for debate.
Anyway wait till you read the next blog!
ciao ciao
Caroline
That's exactly what schools do these days, allegedly -- coach to exams, rather than teach the subject. It's a consequence of the constant assessment and testing and bureacracy we have nowadays, league tables and so on. But there's nothing new aboutt looking at past papers and cramming for exams, really. I don't think the internet can be blamed.
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