Health & Fitness
Reading Is Not Dead, It Just Looks Different
Is reading more than a paper book? The Burlingame Public Library can help you change the way you read.
Some media reports would have you think reading is dead. Not so, but the delivery methods are changing.
Writing, and therefore reading, have been around since 3200 B.C., give or take a few years. The first printed book was the Gutenberg Bible, a 42-line work in 1455, set by Johannes Gutenberg. Since that time books have been traditionally known to have a front and back cover with pages in between and writing on those pages. You know what a book is - you have had them in your hands since you were a tot.
Somewhere around 1971, a guy named Michael S. Hart decided to spend some of his computer time at the University of Illinois not in computing but in storage and retrieval. He typed up the Declaration of Independence and sent it through on the networks. Ebooks! Ebooks went through clunky stages where you could only read them on your desktop computer - not great for beach reading - to even clunkier devices like a Franklin PDA.
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No more! Want to read James Patterson on your cell phone? Done! How about Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking on your iPad? Potentially messy in the kitchen, but done! Someone gave you a Kindle for Christmas and it's still in the box? Bring it into the Burlingame library and we can show you how to download free ebooks onto it.
The library offers ebooks for most of your devices from a service called OverDrive. There's also a vast amount of free ebooks available online. Remember Gutenberg and Michael S. Hart? Hart developed Project Gutenberg - a gateway to thousands of free ebooks, readable on multiple devices including the ubiquitous cell phone.
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I prefer my reading the traditional way - front and back covers with pages in between, but I've also downloaded books to my iPad, and I was as surprised as anyone that I liked it! It won't be my preferred mode of reading, but I do like the idea of taking ten books on my iPad with me on vacation rather than one traditional book that gets heavier and heavier as I travel.
You may not be a convert to ebooks, but check it out on our website and come on in and we can show you how to check out ebooks.
