Of course, they are going to have access to reading materials and be encouraged to read--they already do/are.
Micro--my parents had an extensive library and gave me the run of it when I was about twelve. Oops. Got in trouble at school for reading heresy in math class. Potok ftw.
I guess the question is in part whether Grandpa Shooter's, and to be fair, my, feelings that there is something different and special about physical ready material will hold true for the next generation and in part whether access to reading material will be at least as free with a primarily electronic system as it would be with a primarily physical system.
Anyone know if books can be shared or libraries browsed between Kindles/Nooks? If not, major drawback to those formats. Even if they can though, will they? In my parents' home, there were books everywhere. Two daily papers and one weekly, a half-dozen good magazines, eight different editions of Encyclopedia Britannica, three different editions of the Talmud, a half-dozen shelves of classical studies, a bookcase full of biography, two walls of fiction, etc.
I don't want that. At all. I can't even think well in a space that cluttered. Too difficult to organize. And my parents have a hard enough time keeping the dust under control; we have pets. Imagine the nightmare. They just added two layers of shelves running down the hallway up toward the ceiling because they ran out of wall space. Yes, my father is well and truly obsessed with books.
This all came up when I came across the first two "grown up" books I bought on my own. I was twelve, and had recently started earning my own money. One of the first things I ever bought, with about thirty hours' worth of babysitting money, was the first two volume of Flexner's biography of George Washington. I'm thinking of getting rid of them. Great books, but not the kind of thing I read much, and if I ever want to reread them, there's no shortage of libraries. I got them because I had read the abridged, single-volume edition on my father's shelves after watching a tv special on Washington based on those biographies. Could that kind of chain of events happen with electronic formats? How does one go about having an adequate but small personal library?
I guess that's where Micro's list of great books comes in. I could certainly use some remedial reading myself--the must-reads of my childhood and teen years were Pentateuch and Prophets, Rashi and Rambam, etc.
