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The buzz in the publishing world, especially with the IPad now out, is that E-books will eventually rule and maybe completely replace real, paper bound books. Do you ever see that happening? Could the conversation in this video ever take place in the future?
I have my doubts that real books will ever be fully replaced and the shelves of libraries emptied into hand-held computers. Sure, electronics will make some books more accessible. Reference books may become easier to navigate through electronics. Pop fiction will be easier to obtain, read, and dispose. But the allure of real books will never completely go away.
11 comments:
That video is great! I can't imagine there not being paper books. I see the value in electronic books, but I prefer the old fashioned kind. And I'm a techie. I love my gadgets, but to me, I work on the computer, writing, so I don't want to also do my reading on it--except maybe when I'm traveling.
I love the video too. I love books, the smell of the pages, turning the pages. I don't want to scroll. When I read, I want to relax. Scrolling isn't relaxing.
I agree with you Becky. I think there will always be a place for paperback and hardback books but I also know that the ebook is a wonderful thing, too. I now have both types of books in my library and I enjoy them both.
I love reading e-books on my kindle but one thing that e-books should never replace in my opinion is the experience of holding a child and a book together on your lap and reading and turning pages together. :)
I think there are too many people, right now at least, who feel there is nothing comparable to holding a book in your hands, being unplugged from electronics, and slipping away into a fictional world.
I know I prefer to read paperbound books to books on my computer.
I agree with all of you, but I also see that the kids growing up now will be going more and more to electronic text books and such. They already do electronic gaming for relaxation, so electronic fiction reading isn't so far a leap for them. More and more they will expect to have everything they want on one hand held device. They won't know what they are missing by not knowing how to do tabletop games and puzzles or to hold a book with real pages. Browsing a book store or a library will be a foreign experience for them. Most are already removed from the old record store.
The iPad is already changing the feel of e-books to give you that page-turning effect versus the computer scrolling.
Change! We don't like it, but we must face it and adapt to it.
I just read that the SECOND thing printed on a Gutenberg Press was a report about the death of books.
So this has been a danger for a long time.
:)
I think the thing that would entice me into ebooks is the chance to NOT have 300 books stacked around my house. My personal collection of favorites.
But if I did get a NOOK or a KINDLE or an IPad, I'd have to BUY all these books again, right? A huge number of my books are scrounged from used book store, old backlist copies of authors I discovered. Yes, I buy their NEW stuff as it comes out, but all those old books? I'd have to buy them? New? There's no 'used bookstore' for older books.
So, we're talking what??? 300 x 10 = 3000
That's 300 books times ten dollars apiece as ebooks.
I'm not going to spend that money. So I'd STILL Have the stacks of books and getting my bookshelves under control is the only lure for me.
So no. Not now at least.
I love the video! Thanks for sharing that with us. I hope we will always have books we can hold in our hands. : )
I agree with Mary. I have TONS of books around this messy house, and if I were to buy a Kindle...what? I'd have to purchase all those books electronically? There's no way I'm doing that! I don't think there will be a death to print books. I think they're here to stay, right alongside the e-books. There's a need for both.
I'm terribly conflicted when it comes to e-books. I went on a business trip to Europe with my husband and it was very nice not to have to carry any books with me as I used my Palm pilot as an e-reader. However, by the time we got back (we were gone a week) I was deliriously happy to get my hands on a real book again. So I can appreciate their usefulness but I hope they never replace real books. What would any of us put on our bookshelves?
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