Neutral inflection and natural speed please.
It’s a sunny day. You’re sitting back against a tree, enjoying the stillness, without a care in the world. In that shaded, restful state, you’re holding a book, one you’ve read a dozen times. That book is perfectly balanced in your hand. The book is familiar. It’s been faithfully sitting on your shelf at home, waiting for you and it’s never let you down. Can you imagine that these words are told about electronic soulless book? I absolutely can’t.
I've been interested in this topic for 7 years. I am a faithful supporter of books printed on paper since I have tried both the paper and e-books. At the moment it’s really a heated debate.
We all live in a world of innovations. What’s new and flashy today will be old tomorrow. And only we can stop this process and change everything, because so long as there are people out there that love to turn the pages, books will never disappear. And in my speech I would like to tell you why you should support books printed on paper.
The printed books satisfy reading needs in ways that can’t be digitally replicated.
So I would like to talk about two main reasons why the printed book can’t be replicated: Firstly, because the printed book is a tactile physical object and secondly because the printed book is better as a tool for learning.
So the first reason why the printed book can’t be digitally replicated is a tactile experience.
Books can be touched, they can be held, they can be smelt. As Annie Proulx, the New Yourk Times journalist says: Books give aesthetic and tactile pleasure, from the dust jacket art to the binding, paper, typography and text design. The scent of physical books — the paper, the ink, the glue — can conjure up memories of a summer day spent reading on a beach or an overstuffed chair by a fireplace. An e-reader, in comparison, doesn’t necessarily smell like anything.
However, readers may not need to sacrifice all the tactile pleasure of the printed page. In fact, nostalgic e-book readers can now recapture that new- or old-book scent with perfumes such as In The Library and Paper Passion. And for the budget reader, all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer. As the advertisement states: With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book.
However there is one “but”. Smell is just one part of the tactile experience. When a reader is able to touch and feel the pages, it may help the brain understand where the person is in the story. Without this tactile help, scientists of Norway's Stavanger University say, the Kindle and other e-readers fall short of creating the same kind of deep reading and learning that people can experience with paper books.
Keeping the importance of tactile book-feeling in mind, let’s turn to the point of printed books as a tool of learning.
The second reason why the printed book can’t be digitally replicated is its learning advantages.
Erik Wästlund of Karlstad University in Sweden has conducted some research into this field. In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the READ test — a 30-minute, reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
Despite that, screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as “War and Peace,” but the New York Times, Washington Post and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in the same way.
Regardless the fact is: Not only do people comprehend less when they read from screens, they also remember less in the long term. For one study, scientists from Norway focused on 50 people. Half read from real books and half from electronic readers. Those who read from the electronic readers failed to remember in which order events occurred in the text. They were unable to recall what they learned as well than they would when reading a paper book.
In closing, for many readers, nothing can ever truly replace a book. So much work is put into book covers, but that work is minimized on a screen. Cracking the spine of a brand new book is a pleasure that no technology can give. Moreover, people who use their e-readers frequently still have a stack of books somewhere. And one way or another you will still keep buying your favorite paper books just because you like having them around. Only with your help the printed books will never die.
I didn't see your note, sorry about that. I'm brand new to this site and wasn't aware that you could leave notes. I'm not sure if I had a neutral inflection on everything and I did change my pace a few times so that I wouldn't sound monotone.
I did make a mistake you should be aware of, I accidentally added an -s, when speaking, to "I would like to talk about two main reasons why the printed book(s) can’t be replicated", and I didn't correct one of your final sentences "They were unable to recall what they learned as well than they would when reading a paper book." It should say "They were unable to recall what they learned as well as [they would have if they were] reading [from] a paper book".
Other than that I hope I've done a satisfactory job. Have a good day.