What is replacing our books? A good answer would be ebooks. No! Wrong answer. How many ebooks have you or your friends read in the past 3months? Still thinking? Well, you may have read a couple but it still is the wrong answer. More people are reading less of hard paper back and more of ebooks. This I discovered at last year's GLS(Global Leadership Summit)
Fredrik Haren, who handled one of the sessions had this to say about what has happened to our books.
We didn’t shift from “book” to “e-book.” We went from “book” to “Facebook,Twitter, YouTube, Angry Birds and the rest.”
What!!! No, that can't be true?
Let me ask a simple question I was asked. When was the last time you read a book for fun or as an anti boredom pill? Do you now see the obvious?
Research says that the percentage of American adults who read literature — any novels, short stories, poetry or plays — fell to at least a three-decade low last year, according to a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts(source)
Things are really going downhill for books and they are not obviously been replaced by ebooks.
Why don't we read any more?
I won't be surprised if you never read upto this point. The average person including myself would likely scroll to the end of this write up after the first paragraph.
I feel the greatest issue with books becoming less appealing is with the issue of concentration.
Read this excerpt.
The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the affects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain.
Researchers in Canada surveyed 2,000 participants and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms (EEGs). Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (or about when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds.
Source
So simply putting it, the average individual looses concentration after 8 seconds! That's a huge problem to reading. Reading a book might take you from a week to about a month or beyond to complete. It's impossible to finish a book if you can't concentrate. That's one of the reasons why an ebook may never replace a real book. Because the likelyhood of you concentrating through is small. You have a rich collection of distractions built in for you(you actually paid for all of it). From WhatsApp notifications to your urge to complete one more level on angry birds, you have yourself distraction on a plate.
I can't tell where exactly our books will be in the future. But I'm still convinced they might hang around a little longer. So while they are still around, Lets pick up a book.