The internet: Killing and Sustaining Books at the Same Time

Technophobes love to point their fingers at the internet and accuse the internet of killing tons of stuff. The internet is a mass murderer and has killed everything from interpersonal interaction to music to books. The strange thing though, is that the internet has done a lot for those same things it supposedly killed. Let's look at books, for example.

Here's some ways that the internet has helped books.

1. Book trailers- YouTube has a ton of these. Smaller publishing houses and the biguns have both found these videos to be a great way to drum up hype for new releases. Here's an example:


2. Chronological reading through blogs- I've seen a couple of examples of this and I bet it's going to get more popular once more people see how fun this can be. For instance, Dracula is an epistolary novel. It's written as a series of dated diary entries written by the protagonist, Jonathan Harker. The novel starts on May 3, so on May 3 of this year the first blog entry was put up. It's an incredible way to read a novel because you're truly able to experience the pace of events!
Another example of this was when George Orwell's journal was blogged chronologically according to the date of the entries.
If you subscribe to these on an RSS feed it's easy to keep up.
Here's Dracula and here's Orwell.

3. eBooks- More and more people are reading books online. Now, I don't read books online, so I'm not sure where the best places are to get eBooks, but here's a place to start.

So, the internet, while it can be quite the unpredictable force, isn't out there to steal your beloved tomes and eat your babies.