Monday, 27 August 2012

Non-fiction, unneeded and unwanted

In the long trek which is primary school English, pupils are taught about different types of books. Fiction and nonfiction. However in mad modern times in which we live in, there is simply no need for non-fiction books.

With non-fiction books you have page of page of information. Some of it is relevant but some isn't.
However if you find a magical non-fiction book called the Internet, it has all the information you could ever wish for, and it's free! Disadvantages are that you don't know if all the information is genuine (as anyone could have wrote it).

Children are taught how to use the Internet from an early age. And they get marked on their internet searching skills sometime during their school life so using by the time they need to revise at college and university, using the internet is 2nd nature to them (although by that age there is a lot of distractions for them on the web too).

People have tried to meet in the middle with this problem and that came in the form of e-books like the Amazon Kindle. These are still not a solution because e-books are only good for fiction.

I think, unfortunately, I am drawing to the conclusion that non-fiction books are disappearing and there is nothing we can do about it because the internet is too good. If this happens, the next generation will never get the pleasure of picking up a completely random non-fiction book and learning something completely new.