The level to which wehave elevated design

"If you look atthe content of the average newsstand over the past 10 years, ininkonpaper there's much more of an emphasis on the visual, adeemphasis on the written word in the traditional sense, and therise of interactive stuff: crosswords have always been with us butnow there's this proliferation, puzzles and so on." Looking through the State Library's snapshots, this isabundantly clear: the 1999 collection reveals a vast shift incontent and attention to design. "The level to which wehave elevated design and typography, to such a critical artform inthe marketing of reading, is incredible," says Cowley. "The contentlisted on the cover of a magazine would have been much morecritical for a buyer, the thing that attracted them. Now, you wouldbe taken with the look and design of it before you start evenreading what the contents are." Neither Cowley nor Mackay thinks the book will die or that wewill become nonliterate, but Mackay describes a "retreat" fromliteracy: a tapering in the dominance of print as the medium fortransmission of mass culture as a direct result of the rise ofaudiovisual formats mainly television and thesubsequent online and mobilephonebased alternatives. "Reading in general will continue but what we read is going tochange and the way we read is going to change," says Mackay. "Therewill be much more emphasis on brevity even in a newspaperstory today, what the reader wants is the 200word summary of whatthe piece is about." Shorter grabs, easier formats, reducedvocabulary. "In a culture in which our attention span is shortening and inwhich we are always looking for the quick and easy solution the shortcuts for reading are just part of that culture shift. Whenyou get down to Twitter and SMS you've reached what we would almostthink of as being about as brief and instantaneous as it can get.No Rosetta Stone Japanese doubt it will go further." The future, perhaps, comes in the form of something far moreappealing than the computers we now use, a single sheet that mightdo away with printed material yet preserve goodquality newspapersand magazines. Known as epaper, "intelligent plastic" or "movingnewspaper", this A4sized cardboardthin computer screen isactually a flexible polymer sheet (a oneoff purchase you can rollup to tuck into your handbag). Unlike more cumbersome ebooks (even the forthcoming AppleTablet), the University of Cambridge's epaper is styled toactually look like a newspaper or magazine. It mimics thetypography, the photography, the fonts. It has unlimited content.But, crucially, it automatically updates before your eyes and iseasily transported. Imagine sitting on a train while yourAge, New Yorker or Who! Weekly frontpagereassembles itself to display the latest breaking news. Mackay might leap on such a thing. He reveals, with somebemusement, how his reading habits have changed with the electronicage, now finding his reading even of novels, professionalbooks and journal articles to be "much more snatched, inhighfrequency bursts". "I would struggle to remember a day that Ispent [the entire day] reading. Go back 20 years, that would havebeen quite common. It just doesn't happen now unless I'm onholidays. I also no longer read a daily newspaper, not religiouslysix or seven days a week as I did most of my life. I have noticedover the past three years I am seeing the paper three or fourdays." There are many things we no longer do: one of the things Cowleymourns in the library's snapshots is how we have almost entirelyabandoned the handyman magazine, so popular in earlier decades."Every dad had a garage and a bunch of tools in those days, andthey would get a magazine to get ideas in the same way as womenwould get knitting patterns," he says. "How many people now do youknow who are spending their nights in a garage hammering away? Inour timepoor world, we outsource more things. We have moredisposable income so we don't fix things any more."

Posted in: Rosetta Stone,Rosetta Stone Outlet,rosetta stone software,Rosetta Stone V3