The Future of Books

It’s the year 2007 and things haven’t changed much. Newspapers are still being printed. Recording companies continue to make lots of money by playing the middleman. And computers look pretty much the same since their introduction - monitor, keyboard, mouse.

Sure, things are evolving rapidly, such as CPU speed, Internet bandwidth and web browser capabilities. But there hasn’t been anything really new since the PC and the Walkman. What’s the next revolution, and when is it going to happen?

I think it would be something to do with the notebook. I’m sure someone is going to come up with foldable, cloth-like, inexpensive [1] computer displays that can also accept input. In the meantime its batteries should be able to last at least the whole day instead of just three hours. And wireless Internet should be absolutely everywhere and be superfast.

Now that would be something. Lots of things would be rendered irrelevant: books, bookstores, libraries, librarians (you poor dears), physical media for music and movies, television.

Except that I couldn’t imagine life without books. I like holding them and turning the pages and the sense of completion in finishing one. So they might not disappear altogether, but as demand for them winds down, they would become ridiculously expensive and only dinosaurs who were born way back in the twentieth century would want to buy them.

Notes

1. Revolutions are heralded not by new inventions per se but by their mass availability, e.g. the Ford Model T and IBM PC clones.

7 October 2007 | Uncategorized | Comments