Thursday 4 July 2013

Reading Books on the MRT

As part of our recent trip to Sri Lanka we had a couple of days in Singapore on the way back - the connecting flight times were horrible - and during that we rode the MRT - Singapore's internal train service - to quite a few places.

Previously I've written about my impressions of people reading books on the bus in Canberra, so while I was on the MRT I looked around to see what other folks were doing.

Singapore is assertively high tech. Everyone seems to have a smartphone and a good number of them seem to be in use at any one time - certainly a good many people were using their on the train, either to make calls, text, check email, or play games.

Oddly, and this could be an aspect of the time of day as we were not riding during peak hour, there didn't seem to be that many tablets in use although quite a few people sported oversize phablet phones, and as far as I could see, no e-readers.

But there were people reading books - good old paperback books. Now some of them could be students reading them for school - quite a few of the books being read seemed to be nineteenth century English classics - but they were books, not versions downloaded from Gutenberg ...

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