Are the French preparing an e-book revolution? E-Book Revolusion

Concepts: E-book Publishing; new business model & new media ecosystem; readers’ preference/ expectation; multimodal 

Nowadays, technology advancement has change human lifestyle in many angle includes the way people interact with each other, the fashion style, the businesses, even there’s a new trend of reading books. In France, the e-book has become a revolution due to several mechanisms such as the Publishers' attitude, Neutrality of media as well as the Innovation (Neuman, F 2013). Despite of having the feeling to touch the printed books, feel the pages in hand, flipping the papers, the smell of the books, or other ‘personal nostalgia experience’, e-book has its own magnetism to appeal bookworms. According to Fabrice Neuman (2013), the acceptance of the E-book among societies is viewed as positive. E-book or Digital Book is book-length publication in ‘soft-copy’ form, which people can read the content on computer or other electronic devices. Besides easy to obtain and cheaper compared to the printed version (some e-books are even free to be download), e-book are user-friendly, with the features of lighted screen, readers are able to read the e-books in the dark, zooming, plus the screen brightness, font size and font color can be adjust at the setting preference. While most of e-books are written in English language, the digital dictionary and translate features, are available for users. The best part of owning an E-book, it is like a shelf of books in a single tablet, which are convenient for you to carry anywhere you want. Moreover, the apps allow you to update the book version, rating the book, leave comments about the books, recommend and send the e-book to friends as a gift. As for little readers who are still struggle for ‘ABC’, there are thousands of e-books that available with audio functionality to help them to read. 

Oxfordowl is one of the web that offer free e-books for the kids (available at www.oxfordowl.co.uk). According to Valerie Chernek (2013), reading e-books with audio are potential to enhance the children learning experience by engaging them in the content in multisensory ways. Thus, with such edges, there are no question mark to doubt why e-book revolution has occur worldwide.

References

Chernek, V 2013, Can Audio and/or Digital Books Improve Your Child’s Learning Outcomes?, Available at <http://www.ncld.org/students-disabilities/assistive-technology-education/audio-digital-books-improve-childs-learning-outcomes> Accessed at 13th June 2013.

Neuman, F 2013, Are the French Preparing an E-Book Revolution? Mais Oui!. Available at <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/03/are-the-french-preparing-an-e-book-revolution-mais-oui084> Accessed at 14th June 2013.