Reading couldn’t be e-easier!

Amazon already sells more ebooks than paperbacks and their Kindle sales are estimated at 1 million a week, while 13 million iPads were sold in the last quarter of 2011. The British alone bought 12.7 million ebooks in just the first half of last year (double 2010’s figures) according to the Publishers Association and this month will be a record for digital book sales. Turkey is investigating buying 15 million tablet PCs for its educational system as part of the FATİH Project (Movement for Enhancing Opportunities and Improving Technology) and is in the early part of the process -- which so far has seen Economy Minister Zafer Çağlayan touring Seattle and Silicon Valley and meeting with Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft seems to have gained favor, and may send teams to Turkey to help assess the project, but with 15 million unit sales on the table, it’s highly likely both firms (and possibly others) will be aggressively pursuing the deal. So is this the death knell for the traditional book?

Richard Garner, education editor for “i” (a kind of potted version of The Independent), writes that the death of classroom textbooks has been predicted by the new leader of Britain’s top girls’ schools. According to Louise Robinson, the incoming president of the Girls’ Schools Association, in her first interview, students will in the future access texts through smart phones and e-readers. “Taking on board the fact that textbooks will be on your mobile, whatever shape, name or type of fruit your mobile relates to … anywhere, anytime, anyplace -- it’s a huge possibility,” she said.

It is not hard to imagine and with the pace of technological change and development these days almost anything is possible. I can just see the relief of school kids’ and students’ faces at no longer having to lug heavy bags of books back and forth between home and school or university. And just think of all the trees that will be spared the chainsaw to be left to get on and do their job of re-oxygenating our asphyxiated planet and providing beauty to our beholding.

Libraries going digital

Most of you know that I am an avid reader and an eager evangelist of the message that reading is the road to educational salvation and success. I love books. Indeed, I had a large library in İstanbul and am currently collating my father’s even bigger one at home. I love the beauty of the bindings, the artistry of the artwork on dust -- jackets and book covers these days, as well as the perfume of paper and ink. Shelves of quality books are as decorative as the finest pictures and photographs with which most of us love to adorn our walls. And yet! And yet! Books are heavy individually, and certainly, collectively; they take up an inordinate amount of room in our increasingly restricted living spaces; they collect dust and are expensive items to send, store or remove. No wonder, therefore, that major libraries are digitizing their collections as the premiums on space become exorbitantly expensive for local governments to provide -- though not such a problem in Turkey where there are almost no publicly accessible libraries.

Technology, it seems, has come to our rescue. Umberto Eco, who shot to fame with “The Name of the Rose,” has a library, jointly with his wife in their two houses, containing 50,000 books. He has called books “the corridors of the mind” and recently co-wrote an extended love letter to the printed text called “This is Not the End of the Book,” to be published on May 3 of this year by Virgin. However, this does not make him a digital Luddite. Indeed, to save having to carry a bag full of books on his lecture tours, he uses an iPad with the relevant titles downloaded. Nevertheless, he contends that this is not the end of the book as we know it. In his opinion, reading devices are fine for long journeys and most useful for reference books, but committed readers will still crave the physicality of “real” books -- not just “Pride and Prejudice” but my “Pride and Prejudice,” as it were.

Not so long ago I was of the firm belief that e-readers were impossible quackery with no future outside a small circle of geeks, nerds and techno-freaks, who just must have their latest gadget or gismo fix. I am no longer so stridently sure. Having moved from England to France and back again and then from England to İstanbul… and back again, I have had to abandon hundreds of books. Hundreds more are currently in store in İstanbul and will cost a fortune to repatriate. For someone like a TEFL teacher, an international financial consultant, an oil engineer, a roving reporter, a diplomat or even a ship’s captain, a Kindle or an iPad is a godsend. Thousands of titles are available for download anytime, anywhere, many of them free. More and more are coming on-stream, even those long out of print as Google works to digitize every publication produced. Ever.

Gail Rebuck, a publisher, in an article for The Guardian (Dec. 31, 2011), talks about “the human need to read.” She begins: “Why should we bother reading a book? All children say this occasionally [most of my Turkish students, most of the time!], but for the first time in the 500 years since Johannes Gutenberg democratized reading, many among our educated classes are also asking why, in a world of accelerating technology, increasing time poverty and diminishing attention spans, should they invest precious time sinking into a good book?” To this urgent question there appears to be an answer. Psychologists from Washington University have used brain scans to see what happens when we read. They found that “readers mentally stimulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.” Blended with experiences from our own lives, we create new neural pathways and also become more empathetic.

Rebuck concludes: “If reading were to decline significantly, it would change the very nature of our species. If we, in the future, are no longer wired for solitary reflection and creative thought, we will be diminished. … Technology throws up as many solutions as it does challenges: For every door it closes, another opens. So the ability, offered by devices like e-readers, smartphones and tablets, to carry an entire library in your hand is an amazing opportunity. … The research shows that if we stop reading, we will be different people: less intricate, less empathetic, less interesting. There can hardly be a better reason for fighting to protect the future of the book.” And, I would add here, “in any form.” Indeed, it is neither Umberto Eco nor I who would disagree with her. There is no excuse: Today and on to tomorrow, reading couldn’t be any e-easier!