This was a blog I wrote in 2015 and how wrong I was. A misconception has clouded our brains that reading book is on a decline in India. Statistics and study reflects that the size of the book market in India is over Rs. 26,000 crore and the book market is double the size of the Indian Flim Industry in terms of its value! It also suggests that the literary industry is six times or more than the music, radio and gaming industry combined! And by 2020 the book market was expected to grow over 19% per annum and touch a size of almost Rs. 74,000 Crore. I cannot tell you today what the pandemic did to this projection but when you were staying put at home, I guess you must have read a few extra books!
Electronic Books (or e-books), can potentially bridge the gap between printed media and other, more interactive, forms of media. Recent research shows that books read on electronic devices, such as the Kindle and the iPad, satisfy users as much as printed books, despite reading speeds being generally slower. The top 10 advantages of an e-book are
- One Device, Many Books
- Portable and lightweight, making it easy to carry around
- Accessible Everywhere
- Easily Update
- Shareable Content
- Augmented Reality Experience
- Easy on the Eyes
- Read Aloud Feature
- Interactive Elements
- Environment friendly
- Affordable in the long run.
However, I still like the old fashioned book as between its pages there is a familiar smell, a sense of privacy and there is no glare being bombarded into my eyes.
Books have the unique and magical ability to take us on a journey that we create in our own minds, to garner our creativity and allow us to be swept away into our imaginary world. Unlike a film where the setting is created for us, reading is interactive and allows us to participate in the story and paint the characters and their surroundings. This is exactly why books and reading continue to be the pastime of choice for so many people worldwide and will be in the future, no matter how advanced our technology becomes.
Are you an avid reader and a lover of the written word? Or maybe, on the contrary, you regret that you haven’t picked up a book in a while?
These 18 beautiful and inspiring quotes uttered by some of the greatest minds in history will surely make you crave a good book.
1. “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” -Charles W. Eliot
2. “An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise.” -Thomas Wharton
3. “You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” -Paul Sweeney
4. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” -Stephen King
5. “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” -Mason Cooley
6. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.” -George R. R. Martin
7. “I have always imagined paradise as a kind of library.” -Jorge Luis Borges
8. “Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” -Hazel Rochman
9. “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” -Cicero
10. “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” -Oscar Wilde
11. “That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” -Jhumpa Lahiri
12. “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read.” -Mark Twain
13. “A beggar’s book out-worths a noble’s blood.” -William Shakespeare
14. “Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.” -Alberto Manguel
15. “Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.” -Voltaire
16. “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” -Fran Lebowitz
17. “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” -Anna Quindlen
18. “Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.” -Kathleen Norris
For me, reading was not just moving through the pages or rolling eyes over the printed page just to finish off the text, it was more like living in it and making acquaintance with those characters and actually getting connected to them in a way that when the book would finish off I would actually miss them!
With the advent of the age of social networking sites and the glorification of digital media, the time that was earlier invested in leisure reading has now been replaced by spending hours and hours of reading status updates and other meaningless banter on these pages. The abating reading habit amongst today’s youth is certainly an issue of concern and if it’s not remedied, there’ll soon come a time when we’ll find books in museums instead of libraries.
Nice read:)
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