Once every five minutes she checks on her 10-year-old son, Udeep, who is seated with a bunch of comics in a corner. She then walks back to her 6-year-old daughter, Seema, who is busy trying to figure out what books to read in the bed time story section holding thin hard cover books of Cinderella, The Frog Princess and Snow White.[break]
“I love the characters and the pictures and Snow White is so pretty. My teacher read this to us once but I want to hear it again or perhaps even read it,” says Seema.
Times have changed and hard covered books are slowly being replaced with shinny tablets and e-book readers but is this trend filtering into Nepal too? How are the new generation adapting to this? Will books really be obsolete in the next 10 years? Are children reading books at all?
“I don’t think that the children have stopped reading from books. In fact, the sales have gone up and the number of children coming in to read and/or buy is going up too,” informs Radha Sharma-Rai of Ekta Books. According to her, teachers in schools give their students reading projects and book reviews which compel a student to buy books, read it and review it.
In the past 10 years of selling books, Ekta Books says that the sales have increased in recent times even though e-books and digitized books are widely available online. “I don’t think books will ever die out and I’m not saying it because I work at a book store,” says Sharma-Rai laughing, adding, “During the weekend, lots of kids come in with their parents and we have pretty good sales.”
According to her, parents, sometimes, even leave their kids at the bookstore’s children section because they like reading without informing the staff of the store and come back after an hour or so to pick them up, “and the children’s section turns into a day-care center for a while but we don’t mind at all,” says Sharma-Rai.
“Children are definitely reading more now because of technology. In the past, we just had books but now you can read things on your computer, tablets and books,” says Sapna Thapa, Director at MotherCare International Pre-School and Co-Director at John Dewey High School, both located in Balwatar, Kathmandu.
“I mostly read comics and stories with lots of pictures like Ben 10 and our teachers encourage us to read too,” shares Udeep. Shrestha too encourages her kids to read more because she says that it will better the kids English, improve their vocabulary and learn a lot of new things at the same time.
“Being a mother is not easy and added to that is the bringing up kids in a world where technology is quickly changing but you will want them to read and learn and feel the books because we were brought up in that environment,” expresses Radha. She, for one, does not think that books will ever disappear and doesn’t want it to disappear too.
Thapa, who is also a candidate for Doctor in Education (Ed.D) in Early Childhood Education Development and Care at the University of Sheffield in the UK, lays down an example and says, “Even though we have computers nowadays, we will need a person to operate it and set things and it’s the same with books. As long as people are there to read it, I don’t think they will go obsolete but reading online might increase.” She adds that books might be a collector’s item in the future. She is also of the saying that whether they are reading from a book or online, the kids are reading and it’s a good thing.
There is nothing like reading from a book, the smell of the pages, the feel of turning the pages and holding it in your hands, for many of us, because we grew up in an environment when reading (be it comics, magazines, or a novel) was the only source of entertainment. But for the generation next, though the sales of book at the moment doesn’t say so, it might not be the case and that only future can tell!
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