Issue 9: E-book, New media Ecosystem, Audience Perception, Genre

With the introduction of the new Apple ipad, e-reading has just become simpler although e-books apps is not a new thing – kindle, a reading device, has already been in the market and used world-wide by consumers. In this day and age, technology has given us more means to carry around our digital libraries, such as music, videos and pictures. And the advent of e-books has also changed the way we see literacy.

Through an electronic or digital screen, there are additional combinations of movement and sounds made possible. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001) have challenged the notions of traditional literacy's emphasis on print in the light of the growing dominance of multimodal texts and digital technology. Technology has change the way we even teach our kids, as computers become the norm. Children nowadays interact much more with the computer than ever before.

An example of an online library.

Today, instead of heading to the library to read or do research, people in general are able to do it online with devices such as the ipad and kindle. They are able to access information anywhere at any time, and at their own convenience. Imagine bringing 100 books with you anywhere and at anytime at the click of a button! The e-book movement presents libraries of all types with at least three fundamental challenges. Firstly, information appliances are becoming more diverse and complex. Users want to download library content onto PCs, laptops, tablet PCs, and dedicated reading devices, and cell phones. They want library services delivered via these devices too. Secondly, users want to integrate library content with other types of content. Thirdly, many users want to interact with information content in increasingly complex ways.

For students, the concept of e-books is great as a number of social and economic factors make e-books or digital content preferable to paper textbooks. Course material or textbooks in e-book format can be made highly portable. Students such as myself have a great enthusiasm in general for dedicated reading devices such as the ipad and kindle reader software. Although a dedicated reading device like Kindle may not survive the competition from a multifunctional device such as the ipad, any sort of portable device to replace backpacks will probably become a common feature in higher education in the near future. Any sort of portable device to replace backpacks probably will become common in higher education in the near future said Connaway And Wicht.

I believe that students, professors, librarians, publishers, bookstore managers, and the e-book industry face a blissful prospect - joining together to make available purchased libraries and making them portably integrated into devices such as the Apple ipad and Kindle to facilitate both traditional and new ways of reading and interacting with texts.

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Reference

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001.) Multimodal Discourse. London: Arnold.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge

Looney, M., A,. And Sheehan, M., “A Primer on EBooks” Educause Review, July/August 2001
Accessed on 16th June 2010 http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0142.pdf

Lynn Connaway, Heather Wicht “What Happened to the E-book Revolution? : The Gradual Integration of E-books into Academic Libraries” vol. 10, no. 3

Accessed 16th June 2010 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0010.302