Week 16 Prompt: The Past and the Future

When I was a kid, we made fairly regular trips to the library. These trips consisted of us heading out to the Warren Branch of the Indianapolis Public Library, where I would find the phonics books (?), these little blue books with really simple stories, and I learned to read. We had books at home, too, tons of Little Golden Books and some favorite picture books and a bunch of books my mom got from a subscription with Parents magazine. I graduated up to Goosebumps while we were still visiting the library regularly, but I remember our visits growing more and more infrequent as I got older and my mom got a full-time job. I was still reading, but it was more books we were buying or I was finding on my siblings' bookshelves, ones they'd read already and were free for the taking. I still have my brother's super-battered copy of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and my sister's hand-me-down copy of Kathryn Reiss's Pale Phoenix. Books were special at my house. We would get the really good ones at Christmas, and they would stay with us for years. I still have my Harry Potter copies I got for Christmas, even though the dust jackets are long lost and the pages have stains from pressed flowers between them.
Outside of the house, books were passed among friends. I was in middle school when a friend introduced me to Laurell K. Hamilton, and we passed those books among us like a secret club. We traded in vampires and werewolves and eventually smut as we blushed and giggled and hid the books from our parents. When I went to high school, the library was within walking distance. We would head over after school and wait for our parents to pick us up, and while we were there we would wander the shelves and find books to satisfy us for a few hours at a time. Some of us would stick to the teen section, but I wanted to wander the adult shelves, trying to find a series that would keep me reading into the wee hours of the morning. As I got older, and extracurricular activities took up my time, I found it harder to read for pleasure--there just weren't enough hours in the day. I had to decide which authors to keep with me, which ones to follow through their careers and pick up whenever they had a new title released. Time was not on my side to keep up with everything wonderful in literature.
College was more of the same, especially my first year (I started out in architecture school), until I changed my major to English. Then there were all the small presses and the authors I'd never heard of and an entire class devoted to Shakespeare and my heart was singing. I collected nonfiction writers and listened to their stories and heard their words and felt like I belonged between their pages. I started my MFA and I was among those writers and I was one of them. I started working in my library, the same one I would walk to after high school, and I would walk through the aisles and touch the spines of my favorites, silently thanking them for their words.
Reading and books have been my religion for as long as I can remember. For someone who grew up in an almost entirely secular household, I hold onto the written word as my faith. It's something I can't fully explain, but something that's taken root in me from childhood. My mother says it comes from her reading to me every night when I was young, which is something I'm doing with my own son. He's to the point with some books that he even recites them from memory, which is adorable, but when I'm wearing a locket shaped like a book, he'll climb into my lap and open the locket and start in: "This is a book! Black words on white paper! No buttons, no bonus levels, not a single sound in fact. It's the most quiet, ordinary thing you could imagine. Until you learn to look closer. And closer, and closer, and closer...." (Book by David Miles) (And for a two-and-a-half-year-old, I'm floored)

As for the future of books and reading, for me it will remain a thing of reverence. But as far as the act itself--it will continuously transform!
Neil Patrick Harris wrote Choose Your Own Autobiography, which is already an interactive story, but he took it down the nonfiction route! (I'll admit, I was a little miffed he'd done it because I wrote a choose-your-own-adventure essay in my undergrad, a couple years before it came out).
With e-readers, these CYOAs just become more accessible! No longer do we need to get lost flipping through pages to find the choice we made. Click a button and you're there! You can help author the story through your decisions!
Perhaps the future of reading and books and storytelling will continue down this path. With the popularity of someone live-tweeting an event, perhaps there will be live-writing of a book. Oh wait, there's Kanye, attempting to do just that on Twitter (big eye roll right here). Perhaps there will be someone who knows how to actually write live-writing a book! With audience input, who knows where it could go? Traditional publishing would take a hit on this front, of course, as editors might be in low-demand and people want only to trust themselves to tell a story. Many authors already take this route, ignoring editor comments and saying they know best. (Take the edits, please! A typo can really take someone out of the story!)
Reading might become shorter as we feel more accustomed to the 140  280 character limit. We will still read, that much is for sure. The format may be different and it may be more interactive, but we will still read. Perhaps it will be bite-sized pieces. The epics of old may not get as much attention--unless they're broken down into pieces one can enjoy during their lunch break.