Prompt Response – Week 16

Greetings Earthkind!

As part of this class, we are required to publish a weekly response to a prompt given by our professor. This is my tenth prompt response!

Prompt

Both of our readings this week talk about the culture of reading and the future of the book. So I have two questions for you as readers, pulling on your own experiences and all of the readings we have done over the semester: First, how have reading and books changed since you were a child, for you specifically? Second, talk a little about what you see in the future for reading, books, or publishing – say 20 years from now. Will we read more or less, will our reading become more interactive? What will happen to traditional publishing? This is  a very free-form question, feel free to wildly extrapolate or calmly state facts, as suits your mood!

Response

As an only child whose only activities other than reading were music and dancing, I spent a lot of my childhood reading and re-reading anything I could. I read books, I read newspaper articles I didn’t understand, I read cereal boxes, I read anything I could get my hands on. (All of that, and I didn’t realize my career calling until I was actually working in a library in college as part of a scholarship).

Mostly, five things have changed for me:

1. I read less because of time.
2. I have a Nook and occasionally read on it.
3. I only listen to books on audio if I have physically read them.
4. I have fallen in love with nonfiction.
5. I am open to reading (slightly) more than “my usual.”

I still read everything from cereal boxes to newspaper articles I don’t understand (but now they’re online!).

As we move forward, I believe reading will endure. I have a poster in my cubicle for my graduate assistantship that reads: “Man builds no structure that outlives a book.” I believe that it is very true.

I think about my husband, whose main source of reading comes from audiobooks and video games. He reads a lot, most of it is online, but he doesn’t read too many novels.

I believe that, as we move forward, our human instinct to share ideas will continue to manifest itself one way or another. We humans do like to “write like” we’re “running out of time” (Thanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda for giving me words for that idea).

Future novels may be in virtual or augmented reality, or they might take shape in a way we can’t even imagine.

Even with that, I still believe that traditional “books” will still exist, but the face of book publishing will change.

With our society becoming more internet-oriented, more authors are self-publishing. Readers are turning to their libraries to access the free material they’re used to seeing on the internet, and they’re looking for affordable options if they want to purchase.

Traditional publishing will likely endure in one way or another, but like all industries, they will have to adapt to the changing climate. I highly doubt we will continue to see them in their current state for very long.

Those are just my two cents, though. We will find a way to read and share ideas, one way or another.

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Thank you so much for a wonderful semester, Earthkind! Happy Reading!