Quote:
Originally Posted by dmaul1114
Paper books aren't going anywhere. I probably won't buy any anymore (academic books I'll keep in the office aside) as I hate having books around the house taking up space. Too much space already wasted with DVD and CD racks.
But they're not going anywhere.
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I agree that they aren't going away. For one thing, ebooks are dependent on the digital device that you read them on. That means we don't have uniformity in the mechanism (i.e., the reader) to access the ebooks. Also, ebooks themselves have too many varying formats. In addition, highlighting and annotating an ebook is generally cumbersome, and both are needed in teaching, writing, and reading to learn. Furthermore, as I've mentioned elsewhere, one digital reader equates to one screen or only one open book at a time. Paper books is like having multiple screens because you can open multiple books at the same time and see them. Now, this may not be useful for leisure reading. It's not a necessary form of interaction. But, for something beyond leisure reading there are many times when you want to rapidly have various documents open and visible at the same time.
Paper books occupy space and there is an advantage to that. Spatial memory aids us in recollection so we can say, "Ah, I remember the information was in this physical location." By virtual of being digital, ebooks are non-spatial and so it pretty much eliminates our ability to use spatial memory in access and interacting with the text. That's a disadvantage at times.
With all these disadvantages, paper books are not going away any time soon.
What is happening instead is the spawning of new interactions with text via the digital medium and also a few new things added on to the old such as more self-published authors and so forth.
Just like the advent of the computer in home and office life has not eliminated paper documents, ebooks are not going to kill paper books either. And don't forget that computers have been in the home in a significant way (for some parts of the world) since the 1980s, almost some 30 years ago.