E-Books as a curiosity-energizer for the young
“I have never met a kid, or teenager, who didn’t want to know more about something. I also know many, many such young people who watch their lust for knowledge slowly die off, like a battery, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until one day, there is no more power left.” – James Linden’s Gnosium Blog, Aug. 1.
The TeleRead take: James sees e-books and other portable electronic resources as a way to keep youthful curiosity alive. What’s more, he notes that they could help libraries to fit in with the lives of active teenagers–with trips to the beach or Starbucks. He himself is in his early 20s and has plenty more to say in the above entry of his new blog. TeleRead welcomes him as an adviser on technical matters as well as youth-related ones. James even has been developing his own e-text format, ETDF–to be more exact, “an XML specification for electronic text representation.”
Far more than a techie alone, James runs the Gnosium e-text site with classics from Edgar Alan Poe and other greats and has been reading e-books for years (the site is now undergoing heavy renovation, but you can bookmark it for future reference). He has also helped out Project Gutenberg.
He’s James Billington’s ultimate nightmare–a human being who can’t imagine life without e-books. The older James had better prepare him for many more Lindens. They’re more interested in words than in the exact medium used to display them.
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