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Originally Posted by djgreedo
I disagree. Four or five years ago I had a comparable opinion about MP3 players and digital music. For at least 2 years now I've listened to all my music digitally, and buy most digitally. I have been very surprised at how quickly I went from loving my CD/record collection to sticking them all in boxes and listening on a media center and MP3 player.
It will take longer for ereader devices to reach critical mass, and there are hurdles with electronic books that didn't exist for music (i.e. books are harder to reproduce digitally than music), but generations? I don't think so.
We're already seeing better, cheaper devices with each new batch. Within a decade I think that $100 ereaders will be commonplace, and they will be streets ahead of the devices we have right now - just the refining of eink can give us more shades of grey, faster (instant) refresh rates, better battery life, higher resolultion, and better contrast. Look at how far TVs have come in the last decade or mobile phones - I have a phone that is more powerful than the PC I had 10 years ago.
If the last 15 years in technology can teach us anything it is that we should never underestimate technological advances. Kids that are in primary school today will probably be reading on electronic devices almost exclusively by the time they are in high school.
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I hope you are right but I'm not convinced by the comparison with the music industry. Music has dealt with format shifts quite regularly during the short lifetime of recorded music and much of that has been driven by either improvements in quality or usability.
The printed word hasn't really had a revolution since the days of Gutenberg which shows that people are extraordinarily happy with books as they are. I hear lots of comments from people who would "always prefer a real book" and I think that's a fairly common view still.