As books crumble

Disturbing news has reached my ears, for not the first time, but this news has shaken me to my very core.  With the upcoming implementation—if it has not already happened—of iPads being introduced in a classroom setting, people are starting to take a long, hard look at books.  Since E-readers and the various tablets on the market allow for people on the go to forever have a wide variety of books on them at all times, without the bulky weight, more and more people are wondering why authors are not making use of the technology that is so important in this day and age.  I can assure those people that there are indeed books on the way that will be interactive and colourful and filled with all the vastness of the worlds, that offer in depth character creations and allow the reader a powerful control over the story…wait a minute…that sounds suspiciously like a video game, doesn’t it?

Of course it does, but it’s also what people are looking for in books these days.  What child, who has grown up with a healthy diet of Facebook and Skyrim, would ever want to sit down before the soft crackling warmth cast off by the flickering flames of a fire with a book in hand?  Few enough, as it turns out.  The startling statistic is that women 35+ are the most common readers, that’s not very good for us men, it means we spend too much either in front of the television with a beer, or in front of the television playing a video game with a beer.  To combat this, authors are struggling to find newer ways to write, ways that will engage audiences as never before imagined by a book…but imagined daily by Bethesda.

Do not mistake me, I hold a great reverence for video games, having played Everquest for…longer than I care to admit in public, and Oblivion for…yes, anyway.  However, my love for video games does not actually interfere with my obsession with books.  I often find myself sitting on the couch and reading, not for ten minutes for homework, not a one-hundred page book, but because I find it enjoyable and the books tend to revolve around a minimum of six-hundred pages.  Who would not want to read about a devious Assassin who is so cunning that he can stroll the city with only a single poisoned-tipped needle and manage to kill a King with nobody the wiser?  Or how about a Merchant-Prince cast into shame, and in order to survive he uses his knowledge of trade routes to become a pirate the likes of which have never before been seen?  Perhaps you would enjoy something a little more realistic?  How about when England, before it was called such, being invaded by the Danes and the struggles therein?  Mayhaps the American Civil War is more to the tastes?  Try Bernard Cornwells Starbuck series.

I remember when there were people in this world with imagination, when they could vividly picture every single word on a page as though it were an actual movie or video game.  Have we so lost these people that we are left with nothing more than children who stare slack-jawed at moving pictures, a line of drool spilling from their mouths as one eye is always pulled towards the tacky blue and white on their computer screens?  I, for one, weep for what will happen to books when, at last, the imagination of mankind finally fails and we take another step towards destroying something as beautiful as books.  Enjoy your pointless chats on social media pages that tell you that you’re important; I’m going to read how a King was used as a pincushion of arrows by Vikings because he thought God would protect him from harm.