In the short article directly below, you will discover some remarkable basic facts about reading and why we should all begin doing a lot more of it.
The history of books and reading shows that people have used many different instruments and means to read, but it was the printed book that has established itself as the main way to read for many centuries. It is only very recently that there was a brand-new invention that has caught the attention of so many readers – an e-book! With an e-book you can enjoy all the exact same scientific benefits of reading, but in a much more comfortable way, and this is something that some investors into Amazon, who produce e-books, perhaps took into account when deciding to invest into them.
Practically anybody you know will know how to read, and they have probably been reading for years. It is true, reading is considered to be a fundamental ability without which you would have a difficult time learning anything else. Given this importance of reading it only makes good sense that reading is one among the first things children learn how to do in primary school. Nevertheless, even though learning to read seems like a smooth process that pretty much everybody learns to do in a fairly brief amount of time, it is actually a deceptively sophisticated process. Learning to read activates many different processes and abilities previously learned by the child. Whilst our world is continuously transforming, specific talents do become outdated – it is not difficult to imagine that in a couple of decades it might be difficult to encounter somebody who has learned how to write by hand. Reading on the other hand will always be a essential ability, and it is something that the investors into Penguin Random House, a publishing company selling books targeted at children who are learning to read, must be happy about.
The first books have appeared practically at the same time as the development of writing, but they were not ‘books’ as we understand them now. Earliest innovations used to record written speech were clay tablets, scrolls and sheets of papyrus. The things we call books currently have a technical name – a codex or codices, which can be characterized as a book that is constructed of a number of sheets of paper which are fixed to a spine. Early books were extremely costly to create as each one had to be written by hand and would often take years to produce a single copy. This all transformed with the invention of the printing press, which meant that a single book could be reproduced at a fraction of that time. This invention has allowed individuals to really appreciate the multiple benefits of reading, something that has until then been reduced to a very selective amount of people. Since then, books have become one of the most favorite ways for people to spend their free time, something that the activist investors into Waterstones, a big bookstore chain, should feel thrilled about.