One might not be able to share an ebook, but it's possible to highlight and annotate them for all to see.There is a moment in The Confessions when Saint Augustine is astonished to find another scholar, Saint Ambrose, reading silently to himself. This quiet encounter 16 centuries ago might be seen as one of the earliest signs of a reading revolution of its time, coming as it did at a time when the great libraries must have been hubbubs of competing voices. It is worth recalling it from our own period of unprecedented change.We are now three years into the decade of the ebook. While publishers have been slow to capitalise on the creative potential of this new technology, readers have seized upon it, with increasing numbers using it to bypass traditional routes into print and transform themselves into writers. The scale of the revolution is dizzying: according to figures revealed at the Frankfurt book fair in October, 391,000 books were self-published in the US in 2012 – a 59% rise on the previous year. This figure, which combines ebooks and hard-copy titles, compares with 301,642 printed books produced by traditional publishers. The picture becomes no less startling when you shift focus from the macro to the micro scale: in November Beth Reekles, an 18-year-old Welsh physics student, was named by Time magazine as one of the 16 most influential teenagers in the world on the strength of a 19 million following for her self-published high school romances.It is easy to decry... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2013-12-24 00:00:00 UTC ]