NY Times Article: Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

Thanks to the people at the International Reading Association and their "Reading Today Daily" RSS feed, I stumbled upon THIS article from the New York Times. Basically, the article compares reading online to reading print materials and asks if reading online is really "reading". The article hit a nerve with me as I recalled comments made on my blog post entitled "Aliterate Teachers."

What do YOU think? If a person's MAIN literary diet consists of online material, are they really "reading"? Are you okay with kids moving away from books and towards online text?

This ought to be interesting...

BTW, when I was searching for a photo, I came across THIS article on Internet Addiction.

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Comment by Lindy Brewster on September 10, 2008 at 4:21pm: I do think it's okay to be reading online. My kids just showed me something called a "Kindle." It's got a cover, just like a regular book. On the inside, however, is a computer screen not pages. You can download books onto it and read. I don't really see much difference between that and reading in an actual book.

I, myself, still thoroughly enjoy reading hard copy books. That being said, I learn the most from what I read online. There is so much information out there on the web, and it is so much more accessible than most info in a book. Even online encyclopedias are easier to access than hard copy ones at the library. If we try to teach kids that reading in a book is the only "real" kind of reading, then we are cutting them off from a great deal of stimulating material.