People are less inclined to read nowadays. Books just don’t fit anywhere.
Why spend an hour focusing on one task (reading) when you can IM friends, watch videos and stream music while shopping at the mall? Where do books fit into all this?
Technology affords us more options in terms of content--how it’s delivered and how it’s consumed. Movies aren’t restricted to theatres and TV’s anymore. You can watch them on your desktop, PSP, iPod, laptop, etc. This luxury is turning us into demanding, impatient consumers.
People still want to read, but it has to fit into the wireless lifestyle. Books are technically wireless, but not the LCD-screen, surf the net, fit in your pocket type of wireless we’re used to.
E-books (printed books digitized as text files) are growing in popularity. Book publisher Penguin reported their e-book sales from the first four months of 2008 have surpassed sales from all of last year. You can read e-books on a PDA or e-book reader--or even store thousands of books onto your desktop (I only need 57 MB of space to store 59 books).
Mobile phone books are books that are texted on a phone then delivered by text messaging to other phones.
According to Wired.com, “Chaco ... a twenty-something Pisces from Osaka ... wrote five novels, including her best seller, What the Angel Gave Me, which has sold more than 1 million copies to date.”
Books are doing everything they can to make themselves available to the wireless world. So pick up that laptop, or PDA or cellphone. Books have gone digital.

BOOK REVIEW:
TRUE STORY

by Georgie Smith

Riveting, repenting and haunting were my thoughts as I read Michael Finkel’s True Story. A former New York Times writer, Finkel was fired in 2001 for falsifying facts in a story on West Africa’s cocoa plantations. He confessed to altering a photograph and creating a non-existent character in the feature article.
Returning to his home in Montana, Finkel had planned to hibernate until the media frenzy blew over. However, his plan was cut short when a reporter in Portland, Oregon contacted him. Christian Longo, accused of murdering his own family, had impersonated Finkel while hiding in Mexico.
Finkel used this opportunity to reignite his career and wrote this book. He compared their similarities as expert liars, while jumping back and forth between each other’s lives and examining what led to their respective downfalls.
Although the book is well written and kept me wanting to read more, it jumps around too much. At times I found myself making assumptions to fill in missing gaps. Finkel used the book as a sort of repentance and coming to terms with what he had done at the New York Times, or “Mea Culpa,” as he puts it in the book.
Even with the book’s inconsistencies, I highly recommend it. The book relays lessons about trusting oneself, how important honesty is to self-preservation and realizing that there is always “Light at the end of the tunnel.”

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