Reading The Future

A friend of mine came to visit recently to ask for help with a new piece of technology. Her son had given her a Kindle, an electronic reader or ereader. She needed assistance in setting up her new device and was seeking some answers on how to load the latest books. I was happy to help and I spent a few hours on my own learning how the device operated.
I had read a lot about ereader technology and even downloaded books that I could view on my home computer screen. An ereader is a small electronic device that only provides the basic ability of being able to read documents in a light compact and portable format. It is like reading paper without the paper.
As I looked further into how to use my friend's ereader, I found a wealth of online information. I figured out the obvious task of how to purchase an ebook, load it on the ereader and use the built in features of reading, searching and other extras. However, I was surprised at what I also discovered online. As an option to buying new ebooks, there is an endless variety of reading material available for free online. Most of the major classical works from the past few hundred years are freely available online as being part of the public domain. I quickly downloaded 50 of the greatest literary classics in half an hour and loaded them onto the ereader using Project Gutenberg, a website dedicated to digitizing public domain books for others to download and read.
The process of being able to freely access a library of material made me think of what I had missed out on when I grew up on the James Bay coast. Back then, there was rarely any reading material in our home. Mom and dad were uncomfortable with the English language and we all spoke our Cree dialect every day. English was a foreign language and books had no practical use in our lives. If any book appeared in our home, it was usually a copy of the bible, which was not high on our list of priority reading. There were however comic books which we viewed for the images as much as for the copy.
One summer, I discovered a small paperback copy of 'Journey To The Center Of The Earth' by Jules Verne. I remember being fascinated by the book and the writing. It was something that was totally alien to me, yet it captivated me enough so that I read the entire book. As my imagination took over, I enjoyed the opportunity to visit Europe, Germany and Iceland through this book and I followed a group of characters as they wandered deep into the earth. Verne brought me to a time that was over a hundred years before me and to a place thousands of miles away. I was hooked because reading offered a way out of my own reality for a while. When I finished the book, the environment around me did not offer access to any more reading material. I forgot about reading for some time until I gained access to libraries and book stores when I attended high school in Timmins and North Bay. Then I became a book junkie.
The world is much different now. With ease I can find classic books by the greatest minds that ever wrote. An internet connection of any speed is all anyone needs these days to access multitudes of wonderful books. Many classic books, in basic text only versions, are less than a megabyte in size which means they download fast and take up little memory. An entire book is about a quarter of the size of an average music MP3 file. Many ebooks are offered for free in multiple formats that make it easy to view in the latest ereader formats from websites like Project Gutenberg, the Google E-Bookstore, Internet Archive and Open Library.
For a while I tried reading ebooks using my laptop while I was travelling. It's not easy to have a heavy electronic device in your lap while trying to lounge back in a chair or bed. It's also not safe to block laptop cooling fans with your pants, blanket or a pillow, as the heat generated will be enough to destroy your computer and perhaps even cause a fire. The latest ereader technology is making it easier for us to read what we want in a modern format. Ereaders are becoming less expensive and the average cost is under $150. Imagine for that cost you can take hundreds of book titles with you anywhere in the world. You can read on a bus, in an airplane, on a train, at home, out in nature and wherever your heart desires. If you had to carry those books with you it would be impossible. As the old saying goes ìIts the wave of the futureî. The new generations donít read newspapers, magazines or books but they do love electronic toys so they will be getting their books on line. I am happy to see this and just wished I could have done it all when I was eight years old back in Attawapiskat.www.underthenorthernsky.com