OUT WITH THE OLD AND IN WITH THE NEW?

The Mass Digitalisation of Books

Google was the first to bring up library digitalisation projects into the public eye, after having announced its aim to digitally mass bound volumes of what we once knew as books into digital formats.

Now, mass digitalisation is very much the act of converting physical materials on an industrial degree. The mass digitalisation is carried out by photographing of books, page by page. As you perhaps can imagine, human interaction is highly limited as the layout, text, page numbers, table of contents are all automatically detected by the optical character recognition software.

HARRY POTTER AND THE READERS HEADPHONES

“37 percent of people say they’ve listened to an audio book, and the medium continues to become an important substitute for old-fashioned reading. Thanks in part to the ubiquity of iPods other gadgets, audio books remain popular despite turmoil in the publishing industry – experiencing a modest growth in sales in past years.” According to Forbes magazine.

Prosody (in linguistics), by definition is concerned with those elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech. These contribute to linguistic functions such as intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm - e.g. “song sung to music; tone or accent of a syllable.”

10 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD PICK UP AN AUDIO BOOK TODAY

According to Webster Dictionary, a book is defined to be “a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.” Sounds too old fashion for your liking? Well, luckily the internet age come along. Listening to audio books gives you the full experience. Are you not convinced yet? Here’s 10 reasons why you should jump on the trend.

INDIA AS YOU'VE NEVER READ THEM BEFORE

“India is among the top ten countries globally for books and is the third largest market segment for English books,” according to Sanjeev Jha, Indian Director of Kindle content.

Backpacking through Jaipur or taking a calm vacation down south in Goa on a beach, has probably gotten a lot easier for book enthusiasts.

Amazon.com, Inc. commenced a subscription service in India earlier in September 2015, with over 3 million e-books available for digital downloading – for just rupees 150 per month (equivalent to three dollars per month).

THE EMERGENCE OF THE AUDIO BOOK

“It’s a bit like Peckham”. The director of audio at HarperCollins Jo Forshaw compares the audio industry to the area of South London, elaborating that “it’s been up and coming for years and now it’s finally happening.”

In retrospect, it was extremely rare occurrence for the publisher to purchase the audio rights to the book when signing with an author. Now, everything has changed. With 125 million listening hours consumed outside the US., and 725 million downloaded hours of storytelling, the industry is booming.

THE DEBATE - PRINTED OR DIGITAL BOOKS?

Given that it’s a new year, and many of us received tech gadgets for Christmas, I wonder just how many asked and got an eBook reader. There are many versions by which you can access eBooks; Kindles, Tablets, Mobiles, and many more versions of ‘Kindle-type’ formats.