On Reading Books v/s Reading Blogs
Manas has an excellent post about "Book-as-Blog", where he makes the case for splitting books into chapters or even smaller units, and publishing them as blogposts.
While I don't have any numbers for justifying this thought, anecdotal evidence through conversations with a lot of friends is enough to convince me that this is a great idea. I have heard so many friends complain that these days they spend most of the time reading stuff on the net, and that they dont have much time, or patience to read a book sitting down. I personally wish I had more time to just lie down and read some book (which btw I managed to do on a recent vacation). The only reading I get done these days is on a flight or train. (Hmm, here's one advantage of a long-distance relationship).
There is no doubt that reading a book online does not come anywhere close to the charm of reading a book while holding it in your hand. But then, same is the case with newspapers. And don't we all read most, or maybe all of our news online these days? Maybe books are going that way as well.
On the point of reading books in PDFs, one chapter after another, v/s reading them broken down one chapter at a time via blogposts- I think it's just due to the lack of time and the lack of attention span that we have developed, and come to accept in this Internet era. This reminded me of the article in The Atlantic, titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid", by Nicholas Carr, which talks about how the online era is actually making humans more and more stupid by giving them all the information online. Although I don't agree with most of the article, a few of the points he makes are quite valid. It is true that our reading habits have changed a lot due to the presence of the Internet, blogs and all other online stuff.
It seems to me that reading books as blogs is the way to go, especially for those that spend every single waking moment on the Internet.
While I don't have any numbers for justifying this thought, anecdotal evidence through conversations with a lot of friends is enough to convince me that this is a great idea. I have heard so many friends complain that these days they spend most of the time reading stuff on the net, and that they dont have much time, or patience to read a book sitting down. I personally wish I had more time to just lie down and read some book (which btw I managed to do on a recent vacation). The only reading I get done these days is on a flight or train. (Hmm, here's one advantage of a long-distance relationship).
There is no doubt that reading a book online does not come anywhere close to the charm of reading a book while holding it in your hand. But then, same is the case with newspapers. And don't we all read most, or maybe all of our news online these days? Maybe books are going that way as well.
On the point of reading books in PDFs, one chapter after another, v/s reading them broken down one chapter at a time via blogposts- I think it's just due to the lack of time and the lack of attention span that we have developed, and come to accept in this Internet era. This reminded me of the article in The Atlantic, titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid", by Nicholas Carr, which talks about how the online era is actually making humans more and more stupid by giving them all the information online. Although I don't agree with most of the article, a few of the points he makes are quite valid. It is true that our reading habits have changed a lot due to the presence of the Internet, blogs and all other online stuff.
It seems to me that reading books as blogs is the way to go, especially for those that spend every single waking moment on the Internet.
posted by Pradnya at 12:16 AM
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