Mario Vargas Llosa: El libro produce espíritu crítico, la pantalla no

Benefits of Downloading Free Electronic Books
(source: techgon)
no copyright infringement intended

I have always considered the apparition of free electronic books as a blessing: there are so many books that I wanted badly to read, and I could have not found otherwise - either out of stock, or impossible to order from any place, and so on and so forth. Well, I can tell you stories after stories about books that I had been looking for, I was not finding them, I was saved by the Internet, happy ending. Plus other advantages: you open the book on your browser, you open in parallel a glossary or a map (or both), and you are the man.

Well, Mario Vargas Llosa thinks otherwise and he has a good point: the printing industry and the internet target different categories of public, with the Internet being more popular, thus more commercial. Browsing the bookstores in search of a good book produces different results than browsing the web: el libro produce espíritu crítico, la pantalla no (here Llosa in a discussion with Jorge Edwards Valdés at the Feria del Libro de Buenos Aires).

Mario Vargas Llosa: “El libro produce espíritu crítico, la pantalla no” https://t.co/Dj1fHHQOkg via @el_pais

— Pierre Radulescu (@pierreradulescu) May 5, 2017

(Mario Vargas Llosa)