The Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero once said that a room without books is like a body without a soul.

Yet on planes, trains and automobiles, we are witnessing a sea change in our reading habits unprecedented since Gutenberg introduced moveable type to Europe in the 15th century, as e-books mean we no longer need a room with bookshelves to store our books, we can now carry all our books with us wherever we go.

According to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication, more than 53.9 percent of Chinese citizens aged from 18 to 70 read at least one book in 2011, and 38.6 percent read electronic books, a rise of 17.7 percent over 2010.

The digital revolution has already had a huge impact on the book trade and e-book sales have seen an explosive growth worldwide.

But readers and publishers need to think about the future. As the first generation of e-book enthusiasts, we're the trendsetters. In many ways this generation will set the paradigm for e-books and e-readers that will last a long time.

It isn't a question of what books will become in an electronic medium. The question is what readers will become as books become artifacts of the cyber world.

As books become increasingly interactive and more like the Internet and video games, fewer and fewer people will actually read.

Lovers of paper books and the pleasure of the traditional reading experience are worried that such enjoyment from words will come to an end.

Yet despite their concerns and the doom-and-gloom talk that books will become extinct, technology has made publishing more fun, more open and more expansive.

And the Web is bringing more people into the publishing process, redefining what publishing means and giving literarily everybody new tools to write and publish.

So, both in content and form, as John Milton observed nearly 400 years ago, "Books are not absolutely dead things."

China Daily

(China Daily 04/23/2012 page18)