I am sure you have all read the mass of news on Amazon’s Kindle. Makes me feel secure that books will be here for a long time.
As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up on the street, left on busses and passed among families at Christmas and amongst book club members. And until these e-books have the same liberalities as hard cover books (unless publishers deliberately kill them, as I can see with textbooks), paper books will be here for a while.
Every see a homeless person with an e-book reader? Yet, I always see them with a paperback. Who can imagine a hippy backpacking across Asia with his or her well worn copy of Siddhartha in their back pocket? Yes, an idealistic idea, but not very possible with the Kindle.
So I direct you all to read dive in to mark‘s post “The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)” with some telling quotes. I’ll include one here:
Act VI: The act of learning
If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.
School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.
Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.
Richard Stallman, The Right to Read
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