}
I've just read a great article by Rah on Publish0x. Rah muses that reading is a dying art based because Gen Y don't want to read beyond the internet. Rah also mentions that that changed when Harry Potter came out. But I don't quite agree with what he and others say.
If you do a search for "reading" on the internet in any search engine and then click on Images then what do you see? Pictures of people reading physical books. But they all miss the point. Are Millennials NOT reading? The answer to that is NO. Millennials are reading and they are doing so in large numbers. What posts like Rah's and many many others are failing to realise is that Millennials aren't constrained by physical boundaries like we were.
Books - either in hardcover or paperback - are nothing more than a medium. Just the same as vinyl, cassettes, CDs or VHS/Betamax, DVDs, and BlueRay. They are all means of distributing words, music, or video. So the idea that Millennials aren't listening to music or watching movies merely because they aren't listening to vinyls or watching tapes is a fool's folly. We KNOW they are listening to music and watching movies, they're just using a different format. Hell, you older ones would have done the same thing. How many times did we have to hear that cassettes aren't the same as vinyl or that movies aren't the same on DVD as they are on VHS or even 8mm? It's the same old tired diatribe that's been going on for centuries.
But we're looking at the issue wrong. The medium should never matter. It should never be about the medium but about the content. Is there really any difference with reading Harry Potter or even the Bible on a tablet as there is reading it in physical form? The words are the same. The subjects are the same. The only thing that's different is the way those words are presented.
I myself prefer to read on a tablet. I find reading black text on white backgrounds as tedious so having the ability to change the text to white on black is a massive benefit. Could you imagine a physical book being printed white on black? The cost of that book would be prohibitive. Digital media has changed HOW we read to a way that suits US not some book publisher. That's important.
Think about this. In days gone by if you wanted a holiday on a beach where you just sit in the sun and read for a week or two you'd have to forego either some books or some luggage to achieve it. But with a tablet - be it iPad, Kindle, Android, or whatever - you can have as many books as the storage space will allow. That's a significant higher amount than physical. The same applies to music and movies.
Millennials live in the digital age, an age Baby Boomers pushed for I might add. We can't complain that they're learned how to get the best use out of it we should follow them because we need to guide them in how to stay out of the bad reaches of the Net.
It is therefore we bloggers that have the highest responsibility on the Net. If Millennials are reading our content then the onus is on us to give either great fiction or extremely accurate facts. Our content matters more than it's ever done in the past so we must respond... after all, people's knowledge is in our hands more so than people who wrote/write physical books.