Friday, July 3, 2009

Today's library, tomorrow's 'googlary'?

With the technology of the internet improving day by day, we can now even check about information on online libraries and even read articles online. Many people thus wonder whether this would be the end of libraries and the beginning of the online reading age. My thoughts and feelings, never.
Closing down libraries just because online reading can replace it is nearly the same as closing down museums because you can see the pictures of the artifacts online. Reading is never solely about staring at the words and let it go into the brains. Reading also requires the atmosphere and environment. For example, no point reading a romance story is someone is blasting "womanizer" beside you. It simply spoils the mood. Thats one of the reasons why a library exists: in order to provide with the reader a comfortable environment for him or her to read.
As for why not using the internet as a source of reading. There are a few simple points as in why. Firstly, internet is completely distracting. When you are reading a real book, its only the world, the book and yourself. You can spend hours enjoying that book and without anything around you that can possibly distract you, assuming that you are in a suitable environment. As for internet, there is the world, the book, youtube, wikipedia, myspace, facebook, hotmail, msn, google.....and maybe you. The number of distractions is too great for a person to read a book online and in peace, any moment the reader may just go to wikipedia and attempt to get a summary out of the story so that it spoils the entire mood, or google some sites which will tell you all the spoilers you want about the story.
The second and most obvious reason, it hurts your eyes. You can read a book for hours and only feel a slight tiring of the eyes, but more than 30minutes on the computer reading words would affect your eyes greatly. There are research which found out that reading a lot of words on the computer, and especially continuously scrolling up and down, affects the eyes way more than reading a real book for hours. And by the time you come back from resting your eyes to the computer, you may have already lost interest and decide to go for spoilers instead.
A third reason is that many people feel that comparing reading a real book and reading an online book. The mood created and the "hook" towards the book is greater when reading a real book compared to an online one. Thus many people who read books online may not have been fully enjoying themselves compared to reading a real one.
Hence, libraries getting closed down? Dream on. At least in my era that will not happen.

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