The end of the year is here and our thoughts turn to 2024. My mind flits ahead five or even 10 years ahead to think what will happen, what will change?

When I ponder books and think about how they might change over the coming years, it feels like we have much ahead of us as publishers and readers. Recent news of a decline in reading in Australia had me pondering yet again how important it is to ensure we keep promoting reading.

The distractions of devices like phones and tablets put pressure on reading books as a pastime. The digital revolution landed some time ago, but it’s certainly not finished, and it seems there are many more changes to happen in my lifetime. I can remember when audiobooks were released. New fandangle things. They were cassettes too! Antiques now, although I heard on the radio that cassettes are making a come-back. Really? I can’t tell you how many times I had to use a pencil to wind my cassette tape back on after the player tried to chew it up. Then CDs arrived. You could listen to an audiobook without having to turn over the cassette. Incredible! Now you just download the audio file to your phone or hook up with an app to see a catalogue to choose from.

Then came along e-books. Touted as ‘the thing’ that would bump off the printed book, that dire prediction would never come to fruition.

What’s next? There is no doubt that the morphing of the printed book into better and better digital formats will continue. As our phones and devices become more sophisticated so will publishers rise to the challenge to use the technology to offer interactivity, making them a more multimedia style product. Adding visuals to the storytelling, audio and even possibly sensory in some way we haven’t imagined yet.

My fear is the dreaded algorithm. This is the program that ensures you are always fed the type of information that interests you on your news feed or Facebook page or Instagram feed. By always being offered the same type of information we don’t have an opportunity to learn new things or see a different side to a story.

One of the main reasons Good Reading was born 22 years ago was to give readers a broad view of books available and to give them confidence to give a new author or book or genre a go. I return to the basic printed book. The novel, each crafted over years by writers. Not an AI like ChatGPT. Real people with real life experiences and human understandings.

Reading a book, in print or in an e-version is pure and simple. But our response to reading is also incredibly complex. We create in our own imagination pictures of the story. We put faces to characters that we make up from scratch. They are unique to us. We imagine places, buildings, tones of voices, hairstyles and clothes all in our own heads as we read. This is the same of fiction or non-fiction. Maybe for fiction you have more freedom to let your imagination fly, but, in non-fiction, we still have to imagine the pictures the author’s words generate. Each of our pictures from reading will not be the same as any other’s. Everyone will imagine something slightly different.

One thing we may have in common is what we feel when reading the book; the emotions a writer can evoke. We will cry together, laugh together, get angry and be shocked together. We might feel motivated, or pensive. We will want, or need, to talk about it with someone. We’ll push a book into someone’s hands with passion. We’ll express our opinions about it, we’ll agree or disagree. It always makes us feel something.

We will also likely learn something from having read that book. We might have a better understanding of what it feels like to grieve, to love, to have deep inset hatred, to be scared, to be brave. We might have learnt what happened in our history and how that is affecting our country today. We’ll empathise, feed sad, we’ll giggle, then laugh out loud. We’ll close that book and think of all things we felt while reading it. We might even have light bulb moments that will change our life.

Wow, show me something as simple as a book that has all that in its armoury. It’s an old, antiquated product that so many have tried to usurp or crush to the ground. Yet it’s still here. It’s showcased on shelves and talked about around dinner tables.

All hail the book!

Rowena