From oddmanout:

You gotta check out the works of Bulgarian born artist Mladen Penev. Back in 2005, he created a series of photographs titled “The Power of Books” about how much we can get pulled into the worlds inside books. The visual is quite interesting.

Interesting indeed. I’ve been reading a lot lately on the topic of how our minds work differently when we read, watch television, and browse the internet. These photographs (to me, anyways) represent how when we read, our minds and imagination offer limitless possibilities to recreate and reflect upon what the writer wants to portray with words. We can envision something different over and over again everytime we read something. On the contrary, with television, movies, etc, we are presented with one possibility of a created reality and instead of our minds allowing us to reflect on an image or imagine other interpretations, something happens and our brains don’t allow us to immediately respond that way. We see images and our brains becomes inactive. So therein lies “The Power of Books.” With each word written, read, learned, known, our minds are fully engaged and active, sucking us into the world inside of a book.

Not to completely knock TV or the internet entirely, there are a plethora of shows and websites that are informative and entertaining. That’s the key word. Entertainment. There’s been a drastic change since the invention of both the television and internet mediums as what constitutes as “entertainment.” Also entertainment values have soared past educational values in the past 40 years of television, but that’s another argument for another day. I always wonder though, thinking about the concept of planned obsolescence, how books somehow seem to withstand any sort of attempt at “improving” their design. I wonder why that is.