4 March 2016

Are books too old school to be cool?

Yesterday was national Book day and I got to thinking about something I noticed last year while shopping for Christmas presents for my kids was how empty the book shops and the book aisles in supermarkets were.

[caption id="attachment_34" align="alignleft" width="300"]bookstore-india Book Store in India[/caption]

I can't deny that this did disturb me just a little when you consider that the toy and gadget shops were crammed full of people but the book shop next door was almost barren, void of life except for the counter assistants.

In light of this I offer you a question: Have books became too old school to be cool?

Have we become a society that prefers the quick fix of a movie or a DVD over a good read? Would we rather let the directors and producers of a movie tell us how the hero looks and how the land that our hero is stood in feels, rather than letting the authors words paint an image created by our imagination?

We would rather sit with a bag of Doritos and slowly become one with the couch as someone else does the work for our imagination, checking our watches to see how much of the movie is left. We have all but forgotten the thought of "Oh, just one more page then I will got to bed".

Books are not only entertainment and excellent forms of escapism, they have helped shape and expand cultures, they are a written record of our past, both recent and distant.

Most books, even best sellers cost less than a DVD and don't need a DVD player or TV to play them. A little known fact I plucked from the internet is that about 1-6 adults in the UK have reading problems. This is scary biscuits and needs to be fixed, reading opens doors in the mind and some of these doors lead to worlds that everyone should be able to visit.

I Emailed Vidme...

As some of you may or may not know, I make video blogs (Vlogs) for a network called Vidme. Last week on the 6th July 2017 to be exact thing...
http://www.ijim.co.uk/2016/03/are-books-too-old-school-to-be-cool.html
www.ijim.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-39
71262
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JNY3F4534U22UVYDUMHNOGWQ3Q4BH6ZP
<urn:uuid:32a397a6-995d-46ce-b1d6-a9ff2dd12a11>
2017-09-23T23:29:24Z
172.217.7.211
text/html
sha1:5BIGSPXE22POBHODZXGQOZJUP23T35VR
<urn:uuid:180b213d-94fa-438f-b275-ecd755c2cf90>
http://www.ijim.co.uk/2016/03/are-books-too-old-school-to-be-cool.html
response
<urn:uuid:77c376d2-c592-4509-9d12-991b9d659257>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-230-39-145.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-39
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf