-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Monday 2005-11-21 at 07:06 -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
I, too, love books and my apartment is not big enough to hold my library. Does that stop me from getting more? No way.
Me too.
But I think it's likely we'll see digital paper that is entirely paper-like (thin, flexible, probably tougher than real paper) that can display text and imagery like a printed page but be electronically changeable as well as holding its image persistently even when no power is supplied. Such books would have all the characteristics of a book today plus allow moving images and sound and search. No doubt with such technology in hand, people would find new things to do with "books."
I don't need cute features like search or sound, for that I'd have the wall computer or the tablet (think Star Trek). What I want is to decide what I'm going to read, "plug" an empty or available "digibook" to the computer, and download "I Robot" to it in a reasonable time, so that I can take it to bed.
Would you object to having your library in electronic form and only as many "books" as you could actually use at once? Probably, and probably so would I, but that may not be true of future generations of book lovers. I do like to browse my library and pick up titles to peruse just to see what snippet of new knowledge I can pick up. Of course, when I can't find something I know is in some book somewhere in my library, I'm annoyed...
Paper is probably more perdurable than any other technology we have invented yet for data storage. It has been proven "technology" over the centuries. Think! You need a CD. A computer. Electricity. Suppose civilization is destroyed, you have to build anew. You know the "disaster first aid manual" is in that CD... which you can not read, because there is no power, computers were destroyed, and you have to build electronic manufacturing first. It'd take ages! Supposing the knowledge or the paper books to rebuild all that were written and survived... Ok, I shut up. It is OT. Well... it could be worse... that CD could be in word instead of in OOo, and only Linux could be rebuilt because Microsoft had disappeared! :-p - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDgkFRtTMYHG2NR9URAgvNAJ4jJZSsrYRQ2SNRGRzJOWPOZSWuWgCePRBN osLj3uYDLVfrfanwt0ACUMw= =IZFV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----