Will Books Save Us?

Will books be our saviours in this digitized world?

I read only 2 books this year.

Why so?

I can ignore it by saying that I was too busy.

But really, is that the only reason?

Was this just because I didn’t have enough time?

In all the free time I had, I always read articles, wrote, played games, chatted, slept, ate but never read books.

Why didn’t I read?

Articles are small, packed with pictures, they’re entertainment at a fingertip.

Books on the other hand are long, slow, wordy, if that even means something.

Entertainment through books is slow.

Every time I looked at a book, I felt like, “This looks really boring, I can’t take more than 3 pages”.

And I ended up reading only the summary.

I tried to read it, but couldn’t concentrate.

Every 5 minutes, I had the urge to check my phone.

Emails are books killers too, I’m subscribed to a few amazing people who write awesome blog posts, my email list is full of to-read articles.

And I have a powerful urge to clean them up.

All the emails I had seemed to call me whenever I wished to read a book.

Social media dragged me away from my novels, every time I got a notification, I wanted to know what it was.

My phone was always lying beside me, whenever I read, it distracted me, my attention was being divided between many tasks.

The most unimportant notifications seemed to be of utmost importance to me whenever I read.

And finally, when I managed to get all the distractions out of my way and start reading, I read 3 pages and fell asleep.

I couldn’t read for long, earlier, I could read a book 3-4 hours straight without skipping anything.

But currently, the situation had changed.

Short attention span

My biggest problem while reading was, I couldn’t focus my attention at my book.

So much was going on in the world, I wanted to catch up with everything.

I couldn’t escape in the world of books, because the world of technology was distracting me every single minute.

Every notification I received took more of my attention.

And this reduced my attention span.

I had a horribly short attention span.

Does it have pictures? No? Boring!

My situation was bad, I had to improvise.

What I did

I thought that I couldn’t understand the more “difficult” English.

But I had read such books before, and I loved them.

I figured that I had to start back from square one.

I began reading books with a more simple English appeal to them.

They weren’t nursery books obviously, more like the fault in our stars.

Reading them brought my passion for reading back, their amazing stories attracted me and their easy to understand English held me.

Now I’m back trying to read The game of thrones (I know it’s super old, but, I can’t justify myself 😅.)

Final verdict

There are many like me, who used to read before, but then lost interest in it.

Many ignored it by placing time as guilty, some accepted it head first and really little regained their interest back.

The digitized world took over, it became a dark world for books.

The saviour

With the digitized world came digitized books: ebooks.

It was not possible to carry books around everywhere, so came ebooks, the digital version of your books.

And to read these ebooks came e-readers, one device which carried all your favorite ebooks.

Nowadays, these have become a popular alternative to books, although there’s still the books vs ebooks dispute, ebooks have given renaissance to books.

Ebooks have reinforced books, and they’ve done an amazing job doing so.

Ebooks are the future of books, the digitized world is going to change and it may change what we know of “books”.

Did books save us?

Books have saved us from becoming digital freaks.

Books helped me prioritize my digital life, I still needed social networks, but they were not my top priority now.

They’ve also helped me escape from reality, to a new world.

Like they saved me, they saved a lot.

So let’s take a moment to thank books.

Thank you books!

Which book is your favorite and why? Drop down to the comment below!