ART-ENTERTAINMENTS BOOKS - 1

I.A Great Use for Audio Books

If you want to talk about technology creating a feel good humanitarian story, then look no further than audio books for the blind.

We live in a world where information travels through the form of computer screens, newspapers and textbooks. Blind people have long struggled with many of the things that most people take for granted, including the ability to simply open a book, magazine, or newspaper and read the contents.

Additionally, using a computer and the internet to obtain information is much more difficult for visually impaired people. While it's true that Braille is one method for visually impaired people to enjoy the written word and gain knowledge, conventional feel-reading can be expensive and, therefore, not very helpful to many blind people.

When audio books for blind people were developed, it opened many doors for the blind, allowing them to easily get information, hear a story, and stay updated on current events.

With the mass production of audio books for the blind, and others, visually impaired people for the first time are able to really go online right now and download dozens of different audio books for themselves. With this, they have the ability to learn for free or cheaply in a way that has not been available to them before.

It is clear that audio books for the blind have really helped many people obtain an education that they would not have had ten or in some cases even five years ago, and it is yet another example of how the technological world we live in has created huge advantages for people everywhere.

No subject is off limits where audio books for the blind are concerned, so visually impaired people today are able to educate themselves in subjects like art, music, drama, economics, history, geography and literature to a point that was unattainable for the average blind person just a few years ago.

Great advances that have been made in blind education through audio books in the core areas of reading, writing, mathematics and science, and as a result, blind people are able to easily access educational audio books.

Audio books for the blind can also be obtained simply for the pleasure of reading a story. There are thousands of books available in audio formats that can be easily accessed for enjoyment by visually impaired people, and this includes popular and contemporary authors, fiction books of all genres, and non-fiction works as well.

Technology has come a long way in helping impaired or disabled individuals, and audio books for the blind are a perfect example of how modern technological advances can do good in the world.

II.Love Literature

Disclaimer: this article may induce feelings of nausea, disgust, or produce a generally bad temper that could result in violence towards floppy haired students.

The arts are an incredibly powerful medium for affecting people. They are the oldest form of mass entertainment, have inspired enormous buildings devoted solely to the purpose of their practice from the time of the Greeks, through the Romans and down to the present day. They have, at their best, a power to affect people, inspire people, and create revolutionary movements.

All too often literature is sneered upon - the arts are sneered upon. They are thrown to one side and discarded as pursuits for those who enjoy practicing their own pretentiousness and for people who like to read too deeply into things that should just be enjoyed and forgotten about.

The most famous books of all time? Religious texts. There are more editions of The Bible in publication than any other single book on the planet, and it has outsold Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code and every classic by Dickens and Austin and anyone else you like put together. Whilst some would be offended at The Bible being classed as literature, that's what it is, whether factual, fictional, somewhere between the two, or merely educational, it is literature, and the world has been changed by it's influence.

The Bible is perhaps an extreme example of the power of literature, but it can be used as proof nonetheless. At it's best literature inspires people, it can stretch out imaginations and our horizons, lead us to examine our own actions and emotions, and look at those of others in new light. Literature, it could be argued, is the most powerful medium for exploring the human experience that there is. By the fact that reading is the most individual of actions, that most subjective of experiences, the same book can work on different people in a hundred different ways and still have a power for each one. Only the arts can do that, and only literature can do that to the same degree.

So in a world that people increasingly complain is too cynical, that we are all going to hell in a handbasket, literature and the arts can provide a different option, give inspiration when it seems that there is nothing more that can be achieved. It seems that hope and inspiration, even aspiration are all too often in short supply, people that would have been considered heroes are now marketed to the point that their real purpose is all but forgotten.

Literature has been watered down, the written word murdered by autobiographies from people with nothing to say, all too often people try to achieve something spectacular and fail, but literature is one of the few mediums where everyday people are trying to push the boundaries and everyone hopes to creating something mesmerising. Surely now, more than ever, a return to a literature that makes people aspire and imagine better things is what is required.