Page 113 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

Following in readers’ footsteps
Encouraging reading is one of the traditional functions of schools and libraries, but in the digital age we are witnessing the emergence of other spaces offering guidance and recommen- dations, and agents other than the traditional reading mediators.
Digital transformation has brought disinter- mediation and a rise in P2P networks and
circles and communities of users and readers where horizontal relationships are established between peers, who discuss, comment on and recommend books. These spaces are growing constantly and spontaneously, are gaining influence and the capacity to intervene, and are questioning the ways and methods of traditional spaces for promoting and influencing readers.
Statistics confirm this nonstop movement on the Web, on which no less than two out of every five Spaniards spend more than three hours of their free time daily, not to mention access during working hours. According to a report drawn up by Nominalia,22 13 million Spaniards went on the Internet for personal reasons in 2016; 4.7 million of them did so daily and spent more than five hours online during their leisure time. The most regular users were those aged between 18 and 25, who spent more than three hours online. They were followed by internauts aged between 36 and 45 (2 hours 52 minutes), who were in turn followed closely by the 46 to 55 age group (2 hours 45 minutes).
Can technology help createnewreaders?
There is increasing evidence that digital readers are more dynamic, even when they read on paper. And more and more experts believe
that reading is growing and expanding thanks
to electronic devices. For example, lecturers Araceli García Rodríguez and Raquel Gómez Díaz hold that digital literature aimed at children
and teenagers can be an opportunity to gain new readers thanks to the expansion of mobile devices – tablets and smartphones – among these age groups.
These specialists state that
Technology could team up with reading to achieve good results provided that all the agents involved in the chain of book creation, dissemination and consumption play an active role and global strate- gies are designed that allow suitable conditions to be established for their development: publishers, programmers, mediators (parents, teachers and librarians) and of course the authorities are essen- tial in ensuring that tablets and telephones go from being rivals to allies of reading.23
How to make electronic devices allies in promoting reading
The key lies in normalising the presence of dig- ital reading materials in homes, classrooms and public libraries. A number of conditions need to be met to make mobile device allies and to allow digital reading to take off for once and for all:24
• Availability of a broad range of titles, espe- cially in Spanish.
• An offering of good-quality works suited to readers’ tastes, interests and abilities.
• The incorporation of technological en- hancements adapted to the stories but not merely as scattered additional interactive elements.
• Well-designedproductsincorporatingallkinds of trends and available at attractive prices.
Does mediation still make sense in the current age of “netflixisation”?
Despite the phenomenon of disintermediation that governs many processes in the digital era,
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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Readers in the digital age