eReaders or paperbacks: What is the future of reading?

Any book lover will be familiar with the joy of buying a new book. The shiny new cover, the smell and feel of its pages, even the weight of it in your hands; all things that the eReader can never give us.

That’s why, I’m sure you’ve heard, a bunch of us initially swore to never buy or use one. Yet we can’t disregard it completely either. We all know the pros. You can store the weight of a 100kg stack of books on a device which barely weighs 400g. This comes in handy in so many situations, such as when travelling light or with a weight limit. Suffice to say, the eReader is a handy solution to many bookish problems and regardless the pull of that new-print smell, it is an option many of us cannot resist.

The eReader is a handy solution to many bookish problems

Using an eReader is not a negative thing, nor does it diminish your credibility as a book fanatic, it’s simply an easy and fast solution. An eReader makes reading fun or different for young children –  if they’re going to be playing games on a tablet anyway, why not incorporate their reading time into it too?

As for the future of books, both physical and electronic, we’re in an age in which technology and speed get a thumbs up, and slow, pre-technological methods get a thumbs down. For example, a a supermarket didn’t have a self-checkout would be totally alien to us, despite it being a fairly new addition to our lives. However, the books industry is one place in which this need for the speed of technology doesn’t seem to be the case. While many of us wholeheartedly believed the eReader spelled the end of the physical book in keeping with the trends of other technology, Waterstones figures have suggested that the paperback is here to stay.

We’re in an age in which technology and speed get a thumbs up, and slow, pre-technological methods get a thumbs down

There’s a fundamental difference between trying to make books easier and faster and trying to make shopping at supermarkets faster: the experience. We don’t buy our groceries because we want some downtime or because we want to have a good old think, but those are some of the reasons why we want to read on paper and ink; it is something we can have a connection with. That connection won’t be coming anytime soon from an electronic device.