Saturday, November 7, 2009

#22 - Week 9 - Is the Future of Print in Trouble? The Story of E-Books

Well, no. This is a topic that I have researched in the recent past for a previous class, and in my (hopefully) informed opinion, I think print material is fairly safe. I researched the Amazon Kindle, an e-reading device that is slowly but surely gaining in sales and popularity. It is an absolutely awesome tool, but there are too many people like me who just like to have actual, tangible books. Call us old-fashioned, but that's the way we like our reading material.

This does not mean that e-books and audio books are not really cool innovations. I visited some of the free e-book websites, and the material available at the click of a mouse is pretty amazing. I specifically enjoyed exploring LibriVox's website. I found a short story by Kurt Vonnegut that I hadn't read before called 2BR02B. I listened to it, and it was an above average short story. I always find that short stories are hit-or-miss. Anyway, LibriVox is different in that it encourages users to volunteer to read and record the dialogue of the available books and/or stories. In the story that I listened to, five different readers contributed to the recording. That is pretty cool because it takes the monotony out of listening to one voice for the entire duration of the reading.

I was so impressed with LibriVox that I added the RSS feed to my BlogLines account. It will alert my account when there is a new reading added to the website.

1 comment:

  1. interesting issue about volunteering to read a text; I wonder how copyright is handled

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