Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Digital publishing: rethinking a revolution in reading.

Many people these days lost interest in reading books? spending their time too much in front of the new technology, computer, Ipad, or Iphone screen?

Summary

Last week monday, in Melbourne the Australian Federal Minister of Innovation announced a new body a book industry strategic group to educate the publisher or to help the Australian publisher to adapt to the digital age. It is to have a greater opportunity to publish more and to reach out to larger audiences. Bringing the work to the people who wants to read it in different way example literature, poetry in which is include moving images. It is allowing the people to build something richer, particularly in the education and to the general reader. There are differences in ebook and print book and it is a big shift for the consumer to own a physical books and do anything they want to it. While ebook people cannot do that. The readers love the most in ebook is the immediacy and the ability to find the book instantly.

Opinion about the Issue

According to Walsh (2006) explained there is a textual shift take place and that is called as the paradigm shift where texts are filled with visual, electronic and also digital texts. Such texts are called as the Multimodal texts. Referring back to what Walsh said, I agree that texts are experiencing textual shift in this modern society. Where many people are exposed themselves in using new media, browsing internet and finding data, stories and movies.

As a tertiary level student, I rely on the new media to do research and gain information.
However, I have not really exposed myself in using the ebook to do regular reading. Living in Asia region, we are still greatly dependent on using print material. However, we have started to learn in utilizing the new media.

Kress and others (Heath,2000;Beame,2003) supported that the 'screen' and multimodal text have developed new literacies. There are many young adults and even teenagers who dislike in reading pint books but they are enjoying themselves in exploring the new media.

Therefore, Australia opening themselves into publishing their work into ebook is a great strategic to reach out to the people who never read any printed books.

References

Kress &Leuween (2006), Texual Shift: Eximing the reading process with print,visual and multimodal texts. Vol 29, pp 12-37