Open Question To New Worlds Members: How Do You Read?

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Just this past week, over at my regular blog, Philippine Genre Stories, I posted four entries related to the shift in how readers are accessing content.

The first was a review of Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, about a geek who I'm sure would've fit right in at New Worlds if he were from the Philippines instead of from the USA by way of the Dominican Republic; the article talked about Diaz's book, but also how the author of the piece saw it as a representative of the type of story the wired readers of today can relate to. The second and third blog entries I made were about how publishers were dealing with the way digital is becoming a more and more viable option alongside paper, even superceding it. Traditional publishers are falling by the wayside due to the ease by which people can access their reading material online. The fourth is about how a local teacher is adopting his methods to this digital world in an effort to be as effective as he has always been in lecturing his students.

Perhaps a bit of history can provide some perspective.

Knowledge used to be recorded orally -- the histories, languages, events, and ideas were committed to memory by people and then handed down by word-of-mouth. When ink and paper came along, the need to memorize fell by the wayside, since all data could now be set on a physical product that could then be handed down much easier than by memorization. Those who did keep all this in mind lamented this loss, saying that minds would become "under-utilized". Still, the fact that ideas could only be written by hand kept all these ideas from spreading far and wide; the common man and woman did not have easy access to any of this.

Everything changed with the invention of the printing press -- a mechanized way by which words and illustrations on paper can be mass-produced, bound, and made available in large numbers to readers. Distribution was still a limitation, but making numerous copies of books became possible. Knowledge, in the form of the written word, became more common compared to when handwritten documents were deemed unique and more precious. With this, a lot of scribes -- much like the scholars before them -- lamented their reduced role as guardians of knowledge.

And now, we are, in my opinion, at a time similar to the advent of the printing press -- another shift, another change. Digitally, the printed word can now be accessed by anyone with a line to the web and a gadget to allow a connection to it; physical distribution of hard copies is not that big an issue anymore. Suddenly, the printing press now has a reduced role, much like the scribes and the scholars before them. There is, as expected, resistance. Many old-timers don't consider digital works as being truly published, considering paper as purer and truer. We've seen this before; history has shown us much, but the world adapted to each change in how content is saved, accessed, and read.

Many of us were born before the internet went mainstream, but there are many who were born, and will be born, with the internet as a "normal" part of their lives and the main way to acquire information. We are one well-made reading gadget away from seeing a rapid change. Look at what the iPod has done for music -- there were mp3 players before the iPod, but its popularity and eventual price drop made it as ubiquitous as TV's. If e-readers ever hit a regular price of, say, P5,000, or even perhaps P10,000, we just might see something as revolutionary for reading.

So,  I ask: How are New Worlds members taking to this? Good thing? Bad thing? Your opinions, please. Are you guys comfortable with this shift, or not?