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 THE FUTURE OF READING – Is it Paper or is it Digital?  By Michael Kerr, Special Education Resource Teacher, // Sagonaska // // Provincial // // Demonstration // // School ////, //// Belleville //// , //// Ontario //

 In the late 1990’s there was a major shift in the music industry from CD technology to mp3 digital compression of music. This shift revolutionized the way we access music today. The movie industry is undergoing similar growing pains as well. In the future (near future) will we rent movies from a store anymore? Although the music and movie industries have struggled with the changes, there is no going back.

The publishing industry has also been undergoing a revolution as well and the implications for all of us are profound, particularly for people with disabilities. Reading used to mean accessing print material from a piece of paper. In the very near future it will be so much more. Imagine having hundreds or thousands of books at your finger tips on a device that can change the font, size, colour and style of text, place multiple bookmarks, find text, make annotations, look up word definitions in the dictionary and even read to you without leaving your favourite reading nook. Now imagine that this device was also your phone, had wireless Internet, texting capability and a GPS thrown in (just in case you get lost). These devices are here today.

Digital texts or e-Texts as they are called have been around for a long time – they are simply just text files. The reason that they have not gained popularity is that not many people like reading from a computer screen. This is about to change and here is why. In the 1970’s, a new glass display was developed called an **electrophoretic display ** it was simply a glass plate that used an electric charge to spin tiny pigment spheres to align to produce a black or white image. Recently this technology has been produced at a fraction of the cost and in plastic. Do you remember the newspapers in Harry Potter that had movies instead of still pictures as the reader browsed the news report – well we can almost make those now.

The reason digital texts have not taken off is that the digital devices did not exist until recently and nobody wants to give up the comfort of their favourite book – made of paper. Over the past 12-16 months many e-Text readers have come on the market. Some of these are dedicated devices like the Kindle from Amazon and the Sony Reader, while others are multifunction devices like the Apple iPod Touch and the iPhone. A second development that is pushing digital reading is that recently Google negotiated with over 20,000 publishers worldwide to scan and post much of the printed world. Google eventually intends to digitize the written world. Their new website called Google Book currently has approximately 7,000,000 titles listed – check it out and see what you can find. As this collection grows and as some of the legal copyright issues are addressed access to e-Texts will grow exponentially. Concurrently with Google’s attempts to digitize the world the popular online bookstore Amazon.com has grown to approximately 300,000 titles.

As digital books sort themselves out there are tremendous advantages available to teachers and students with disabilities (see photos of Mobile iPod Touch Lab). The reader can manipulate the font colour, size and style. They can change the background colour as well as the line spacing. While reading the reader can click on a word and look it up in the dictionary, or highlight it and make a note. In some devices it’s possible for the reader to hit play and have the device read the book with a computer synthesized text-to-speech voice. Some research suggests that a human voice is easier to comprehend because the voice has prosody – the ability to demonstrate emotion. Portable digital devices can produce human voices – download a digital audiobook from Librivox or Gutnberg Project for free. With all of these options available now maybe 2009 will be the year of the Digital Book. Check out some of these links for further info on the evolution of digital reading.

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