Digital Publishing and its influences on litarcy

Abstract: Digital Publishing and its influences on literacy Thesis Essay In my thesis I analyse how digitalisation has influenced the publishing business, their products and its digitaliation’s effects on our reading habits, focusing especially on the literary development of children. The digitisation of printed media has caused immense changes for publishing companies, who see themselves forced to adapt to modern technologies and changing reading preferences of clients. Critics see the shift from the printed book to digital media as the end of the print media, which is however, according to new studies, a rather premature conclusion. Additionally the digitalisation of print and the increasing number of people reading on-screen has given cause to fear about its effects on our ability to read and understand texts. Critics express concerns about multimodality –the combination of different modes like i.e. images and writing, which is omnipresent in most digital reading—as distractive and destructive to our understanding of text. This is especially of importance in regard to children’s literary development and the fact that multimodality always has been a main characteristic in children books. Now multimodality is gaining even more importance due to the new possibilities that digital books offer. The topic is quite recent so it is impossible to draw definite conclusions, however I aim to show, based on recent studies and case studies, that the these concerns are rather arbitrary and not in line with children’s actual intuitive understanding of digital media and multimodality. Digital Artefact My digital artifact consists in the creation of a digital catalogue for the Spanish children book publisher TakaTuka. The digitisation of catalogues is one example of changes and advantages that digitalisation implies for publishing. A digital catalogue offers advantageous features such as direct links or near limitless space for information. In addition, it saves on printing and distribution costs and time. For the design and production of the catalogue I used Adobe InDesign and Joomag.