I love books. About 500 of them are stacked in this little house of ours. I love the yellowy pages of my old books as much as the stubborn covers of my new ones. So don't get me wrong when I say that books, for the majority of people, are on their way out. It will be a lengthy and partial exit, but it has begun.
I made this prediction a few years ago. Here's a little piece of something I wrote to a professor:
For the antiquated this may sound frightful, but eventually students won’t carry books to school. Here’s how I imagine: just as kids download songs to their portable music players and tote them everywhere, so will they do with books. They’ll have an electronic booklet, which will resemble a small, thin laptop computer with an open face. Within will be files, just like today's computers. Double-click with a finger on “Moby-Dick.book” and up pops Herman’s great work. Students (or anyone) will be able to carry this tablet around and use it just like a book—throw it in their backpacks, hop on their bed and read, whatever.
Here are the advantages, the reasons why this will be better than books in most ways. There will be only one book to carry—the thin tablet computer, because any and all textbooks or novels required for class will be inside digitally, electrons snug within the confines of the circuits, waiting for your command. This isn't just for students, either. Anyone with a collection of books can save space and time by storing all of their books electronically. Forget about bookmarks, too, because a person will be able to do basically anything one needs with the text files: mark his place(s), add unlimited notes by typing in special places (personalized footnotes, hover text tips, etc.), and search, which will probably be the greatest advantage. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to search through your books just like you would do on the Internet? A student is looking for a passage he remembers in a 563-page novel, but only recalls that it contains the phrase “in the same device.” All he has to do is hit a key, type in those four words (or even just say them, after a certain command), and it’s found instantly.
Ultimately, a device such as this book I've made up will become the all-in-one machine the technologically savvy hope for. It will play music, browse the Internet, act as a communication device, and store one's photos, videos, and every other type of file. It won't replace the phone, of course, due to a large screen for reading, but who knows what future technology may accomplish?
Well, I had forgotten about the idea of an electronic book. But yesterday when I visited amazon.com, there was the early edition of the technology. A letter to customers announced Kindle, a portable device to download and read books and other text. With its limitations, Kindle serves primarily as a starting point, a rough draft for the future. I don't know if it's the first of its kind, but now that a major Internet retailer develops and offers such a thing, the idea will evolve along with the tool.
There's more info about Kindle and its creator in Newsweek's article.
