Despite the anxiety that the first digital novel caused in 1993, publishers weren’t too concerned that e-books would one day replace printed books. However, that attitude was changed suddenly in 2007 when Amazon Kindle came onto the market, which led to e-book sales jumping up to 1,260%. Since then, e-books’ popularity has continued to rise steadily. The publishing industry seemed to have lost all possible ability to regain its position. Will printed books eventually become a thing of the past? According to Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company, printed books just for reading will, in 10 years from now, be unusual. “Not so unusual that a kid will say, ‘Mommy, what’s that?’ but unusual enough that on the train you’l see one or two people reading something printed, while everyone else is reading on a tablet computer screen.” And Shatzkin believes that the demise of print is sure to happen, though such a day won’t arrive for perhaps 50 to 100 or more years.

Robert Stein, founder of The Institute for the Future of the Book, however, believes that books won’t disappear entirely, at least not anytime soon. “Print will exist, and it may have an artistic value,” he says. He predicts that the distance between writers and readers will be made less obvious by a social reading experience in which authors and consumers can digitally interact with each other to discuss any passage, sentence or line.

Should print really disappear entirely? According to Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, electronic reading can negatively affect the way the brain responds to the text, including reading comprehension and the ability to pay attention to details like the order of events. “My worry is that we’ll have a short-circuited(短路的) reading brain, excellent for gathering information but not necessarily for forming critical, analytical deep reading skills,” Wolf says. He hopes that we continue to keep a “bi-literate” society — one that values both the digital and printed words. “A full reading brain circuit is a huge contribution to the intellectual development of our species. Anything that threatens it deserves our attention.”

There are hundreds of publishers across the world and millions of books get printed every year. Moreover, a book can be printed by several polishers.【小题1】

To overcome the problem of identifying books, publishers have come up with a unique numbering system. For instance, if 50,000 copies of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are printed by a publisher at one time (called an edition), all of them are identified by one number code. 【小题2】 your address begins with your house number, street, locality, state and ends with a statement of the country where you live. An ISBN book number achieves a similar aim of identifying and tracing a book

If you pick up any book, turn it around you will see a number which looks something like this — ISBN 90-70002-34-5. This is called the ISBN number. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Numbering. 【小题3】 The ISBN number is divided into four groups that are separated by a space or a hyphen.

The first part of the ISBN identifies the country and is called the Group Identifier. 【小题4】The second part is called the Publisher Prefix. The Publisher Prefix is used to identify the publisher of the book. The publisher prefix may contain up to seven digits.

The third part identifies the title and the edition of the book and so is called the Title Identifier, which may consist of up to six digits. 【小题5】Since you can have the same book from the same publisher but with different editions, the Title Identifier helps to differentiate between them.

The fourth and the final part is called the Check digit, a single digit (from 0 to 9) used to check whether the given ISBN number is correct or wrong. If an ISBN number is incorrect, this means that the book is a version printed illegally.

A Time magazine special project known simply as “Firsts” celebrates women who have made big achievements. These women have made their mark in business, entertainment, politics and more. The project hopes to provide girls and women with positive examples who assure (使确信) them that they can succeed.

The “Firsts” project includes video features (特写), a book and a webpage. The webpage has the women’s pictures and short descriptions of their achievements. The project’s producers, Spencer Bakalar and Diane Tsai, made video profiles (简介) of 37 of the 46 original women featured by the project. And the webpage anticipates that more women will be added as they become new “Firsts”.

The women featured in “Firsts” have achieved success in many fields. Eileen Collins was the first woman to command a space shuttle. Jennifer Yuh Nelson was the first woman to direct a major Hollywood movie alone-Kung Fu Panda 2. Serena Williams set a record for tennis Grand Slam singles titles. The road to success hasn’t always been smooth for these women. It took hard work to reach excellence. Many of them also put up with rude comments because they were women. But they also received support from key people, especially parents. Many of the women also speak about the difficulty of balancing work and family life. Their work sometimes required them to sacrifice time with their children or miss important family events. Yet several of them also say that they see their work as setting a good example for their children. They want their sons and daughters to see their mother working and know that they, too. can achieve remarkable things.

Michelle Phan was the first woman to build a US $500 million company from a web series. She tells entrepreneurs (企业家) to find a problem that they care about and then offer a way to tackle it. That is vital advice that anyone in any field should follow.