cell phone books are the biggest growth area for publishing in Japan. It is estimated that 86% of Japanese teens read cell phone novels.
From the Mobile Art Lab in Japan comes a new twist on digital reading. The youngest children get this concept and turn the "page" with the same muscle memory used with paper. What an engaging way to read! Is it less valuable because it is digital? I don't think so.
We need to be studying the literacies associated with digital reading and preparing our libraries and faculties. Our collections need ebooks and digital readers to understand and gain experience working with and understanding what it means to truly read digitally. And we need to do it with an open mind.
I'd like to put in a plug for Libraries and Transliteracy, a blog I find very useful in clarifying my views and learning more about the topic of evolving literacies.
"This blog is a group effort to share information about the all literacies (digital literacy, media literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, 21st century literacies, transliteracies and more) with special focus on all libraries."
An example is a recent post by Bobbi Newman, Information Literacy for the 21st Century.
This is the future of reading.
Ewan MacIntosh's edublogs: