Today as I was checking in Library Journal at work, this article caught my attention--an interview with Ben Vershbow of The Institute of the Future of the Book. I was particularly interested in this question and answer:
What future for the print book? Is it even conceivable that future generations will eschew the benefit of multimedia?
"It's really impossible to predict exactly what will happen to print books. Of one thing, though, I am pretty certain: the main arena of intellectual discourse is moving away from print to networked, digital media. That doesn't mean that certain forms of print books will not persist. In fact, the mass migration to computers and the Internet in some ways serves as a foil for print, dispensing with its more circumstantial uses and highlighting its most essential virtues. There are certain kinds of books I'm convinced will cease to exist on paper: directories, reference works, textbooks, travel guides, to name a few. But deep, linear narrative works read for pleasure like novels, biographies, and certain forms of history may persist in print for some time. Then again, this could simply be a generational question. People raised with high-quality electronic reading devices, using only multimedia electronic texts in school and forming little or no attachment to dead-tree media, may consider paper books at best fascinating antiquities, at worst, inert, useless things."
While I know we can't stop this type of technological progress, and really why should we, since in so many ways it is to our benefit, and many of the changes are really exciting. But I want my books, thank you. I don't want to give them up, no matter how good electronic reading devices get. "Dead-tree media". "Inert, useless things." Ack. Truly I shudder at these words!