Several years ago I bought myself a Kindle. Then I got an iPad and an iPhone, and I have installed Kindle on both. I love my reading devices. I can go anywhere and if I’m wearing something with a pocket, I can carry a library of thousands of books with me. It’s easy to pass the time anywhere by reading books on my iPhone. It’s fantastic. If possible, I buy all of my books in electronic form nowadays. You can underline them, make comments and even print the underlined parts. Of course it means among other things that the book as an object is no longer the interior design element it has been. My friends and acquaintances can no longer examine my bookshelf to deduce what kind of person I am.

As my children have grown, I have noticed how acquiring cultural capital has changed. I used to be an active library-goer ever since I was little. I listened intently when my older cousins talked about books and memorised which books they liked so I could borrow them. So, when I was eleven years old I had already read, among many other books, all of Jane Austen’s works and Molière’s plays.

My children, by contrast, usually come across the classics of literature first via cinema and television series. When my daughter was six, she watched the BBC adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Now that she is a teenager, she started reading Austen’s novels. I read J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter series five times to my children, but they have also seen all the movies. For them, novels and films create one organic experience. The same goes for Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series and the comic The Walking Dead along with its televised version.

I have observed with fascination how the young people of today form their reading skills bouncing from one media to another, and constantly comparing. My children find it entirely natural to compare the Harry Potter in the books to the Harry Potter of the movies, pondering their differences and similarities. Any talk of literature as something primary and culturally superior would be unthinkable for them. They enjoy the diversity of media instead, switching between media and comparing different adaptations. I am excited to see how our understanding of the act of reading will change in the (near) future.

My children, by contrast, usually come across the classics of literature first via cinema and television series. When my daughter was six, she watched the BBC adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Now that she is a teenager, she started reading Austen’s novels. I read J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter series five times to my children, but they have also seen all the movies. For them, novels and films create one organic experience. The same goes for Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series and the comic The Walking Dead along with its televised version.

I have observed with fascination how the young people of today form their reading skills bouncing from one media to another, and constantly comparing. My children find it entirely natural to compare the Harry Potter in the books to the Harry Potter of the movies, pondering their differences and similarities. Any talk of literature as something primary and culturally superior would be unthinkable for them. They enjoy the diversity of media instead, switching between media and comparing different adaptations. I am excited to see how our understanding of the act of reading will change in the (near) future.