Who reads books anymore?
Admittedly, I am not into fiction, and I can get magazine quality content on the web, so why read books?
edit: Another thing that has helped me is in learning grammatically correct english and sentence construction. This is something that I have yet to find in abundance on the web.
A good book can keep you company at any point in time in a day, and more so, stay with you a lot longer (this is true even with fiction). I have found myself going back to several books over the years, because some are _that_ good.
Having said that, there are a lot of crappy books out there (I have commented about that earlier) and invariably you will get one that is despite checking it out (amazon reviews etc). That has not prevented me from continuing to find good books, and it should not deter anyone else either.
A quick cursory glance over amazon's best-seller lists will give you a good overview on the types of fictional books, and you will quickly see that almost every kind of curiosity can be satisfied - technical, mystery, espionage, war strategy, sci-fi, you name it...
And yes, staring at a tube-light all day cannot be a good thing...
It also gets your eyes off the monitor. These things can't be healthy to stare at 18 hours per day.
i read books for many reasons:
1) pocket-sized entertainment w/o requiring electricity.
2) reading bulks of text on the computer is hard on the eyes, imo.
3) reading a book exercises the imagination and creativity more than watching or listening to something.
4) writing a book/novel is an art form and skill. supporting it by buying quality works is important, imo.
5) i personally personally know/knew several authors who make their living 100% by writing. i buy and read their stuff to help support them.
6) a typical book has higher quality content and more depth than what you'll typically find online.
i'm sure there's plenty more reasons, i just can't think of them right now.
Funny (short) story. I used to not read much at all other than what's been described above and computer books. Well, I was out with some friends and brought up a recent episode of a horrid reality show. A very close friend of mine stopped dead, looked me in the eyes and said with just a touch of concern in his voice: "do you know how many good books there are?!" Yeah, I had an idea, but I just didn't read any of them ... Well, the next week, he gave me a copy of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I've been a voracious reader ever since.
- is basically free (or cost of retrieving new content is free)
- tabbed browsing makes scanning fast
- broadband makes news pages load quicker (or similar) to turning a page
- commoditization of blogs and cms via open-source means more noise, but also more signal
- instant publishing
- large lcd screens can be dimmed, and font sized enlarged
There is wisdom on the web, and books are still mobile and reliable. Text books are important, but in my view the case for books is lessening. (unless you like fiction, but much classic literature can be found freely on the web due to copyright expiration anyway).
making a molehill out of a mountain, aren't we? more specifically, i think, a hasty generalization. just because you don't read fiction or something doesn't mean that others also don't.
i'll agree with you if we're talking about the NICHE of instructional/scholastic/informational/reference books. i don't read those types of books.
when you use the term "reading a book", though, you're typically referring to reading for recreation/entertainment, which is typically going to be fiction/literature. i do read those, and so do the vast majority of my family and friends.