Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
Yes, paper books will fade away - just like horses did with the invention of the automobile.
|
Nope; too many comparative advantages; try and give an ebook device to a child for example and see how long it lasts; I owned tons of books with torn covers (by me or my friends), missing pages, casually wet ones and so on; when devices get to that point, so you can throw then casually around, rip pieces from them and they keep working pretty much as before, maybe, but it will require another tech level...
if humanity goes into total body mods (e-interfaces built in the body and such) - assuming possible of course - I may change my opinion, but otherwise I just do not see it in the foreseeable future; only with body mods that e becomes an extension of the body the way the paper book is today in the sense that you need nothing to access it, just itself, no disintermediation, yeah maybe...
cars are an extension of the body, the way horses were, and while they need an infrastructure, horses needed one too; the analogue here would be cars replaced by teleporting, not cars replacing horses; music has always been disintermediated except in direct performance...
farther away we just have "unknown unknowns" so we cannot say anything pertinent...
edit later: Earth will fade away, the Sun will fade away, humanity will fade away, and books will fade away, but that's not the point of the thread as far as I can see