The physical book is dead

A while ago I talked to my boyfriend’s stepdad about books and its future. As he knows what a big book freak I am, he emailed me an interesting little article where a man named Nicholas Negroponte is claiming that the physical book will be dead in five years. He is saying that it is going to be hard for a lot of people to accept this, and I am one of them.

The book has been my best friend since before I could read, and I cannot imagine my life without a book on my nightstand. You can go anywhere in the world and get lost in a story where anything can happen without worrying about what is happening in the real world. I am not saying that you cannot get the same feeling of pleasure with a digital book, which is the newest fashion within this industry. But for me it can never be the same.

The technology is changing almost as fast as the world is changing, and in the end there is nothing we can do with this development. We live in a world with digital cameras, mobile phones and computers where you can buy music off the internet. But just because there are a lot of changes happening it doesn’t mean that everything has to change. I believe that there are a lot of people out there who wants to have a physical book instead of a digital book, or perhaps they want both. But that does not mean that the book will be dead in a few years time.

I have asked quite a lot of people about this, and even though it is not anywhere near enough people to make a difference in the big picture, they all agreed on that they love the physical book.

If you think about how many people who have to repair their laptop or mobile phone because it is no longer working; if you were to have all of your books that you need for school, work or for your own pleasure on a laptop, then you would lose everything. People could struggle to do their job properly because of this and I believe then that it would be much easier to have a physical book to look up in as well. Obviously to have ebooks have made life easier for people, but I feel that we must not forget that technology has flaws that can haunt us if we do not treat it right.

I am very excited to see what will happen in the future when it comes to this subject, but I am very much hoping that the book will not die and that people will continue to appreciate the wonders that are books. 

If you want to read what Nicholas Negroponte is saying about this, you can find the article on this webpage:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/physical-book-dead/