Paper Book – A Death ?

From tiny mobile phones to enormous flat-panel televisions, the digital age has stamped its presence long back in the blood system of our daily life. The technology is going cheaper day by day & is easily available to common man.
There is an obvious analogy between what iPods have done to LP Gramophones and what electronic books may do to the printed page. While the physical medium of books is least likely to be changed, there is an emergence of electronic books or e-books. What then of the printed book? Has the Internet made it redundant?

As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise.

How, physically, will people read books in future? Will technology 'unbind' books, as it has unbundled other media, such as news, music albums and photography ? Will e-books cannibalize their paper counterparts ?

Will reading habits change as a result? What will happen to bed-time stories ? What impact will it have on our lives ?

With e-books giving us company, do you think we are going to pay heed to our handwritings ? Is it the right thing to happen or is it killing some of the finer characteristics of us ??

Personally, I am a bit old-fashioned, I love paper books, love to receive and gift them.. it has a certain personal touch and I don't want paper to go away entirely, but at the same time I won't have any regrets if we achieve a world in which access to all the world's content is instantly available on a global basis, without killing trees, burning diesel, or building warehouses.

And now the question is, what is a book anyway?

A book is a package of large quantities of subject matter, whether it is fiction, art, factual information, educational material or anything else. While books will always HAVE a place, I can't say that books will always be restricted to paper. I can see many great advantages of e-books over the traditional paper books but I still don't think that the rise of the e-Book will be quite as meteoric as some of these other forms of media have seen.

First let us see the advantages of an e-book.

The change has already happened for encyclopedias. Wikipedia, free, collaborative and online, has eaten into sales and usage of paper-bound alternatives. So books that people would not traditionally read in their entirety, or that require frequent updating, are among the top to migrate online and perhaps to cease being books at all. Telephone directories / dictionaries will also fall in this category.
And until recently, classrooms remained virtually unchanged - desks arranged in neat rows facing a chalkboard/ whiteboard at the front of the room, students taking notes on paper, and read from printed textbooks. Things started to change with the advent of projection equipment and individual computers. The trend is continuing, and the next casualty of the technological revolution appears to be the printed textbook.

Another advantage is that e-Book readers can have instant updates and revisions, and electronic contact with all other readers of each book, thereby sharing ideas and reactions more rapidly and with more people. Further, electronic books need not go out of print, are cheaper and less bulky than paper books if you want to carry them.

For children unlike paper books, e-books can be multimedia: letting us mix voice, music, color, motion pictures and leading to animated talking books.
I can see the supremacy of paper over monitor has started diminishing. There are many who believe that the new generation of learners, aka the Net Generation, or N-Gen, are much more accustomed to reading and learning from a screen.
The idea is attractive because theoretically, e-book technology allows you to load many books and periodicals on a reasonably small hand held device, making it easier to travel with lots of reading matter.

And the biggest advantage is it being environment friendly; we can save our trees and environment.

Still, there are many people who remain skeptical about moving from print to screen. Reading on screen and paper for comprehension and accuracy tend to lean in favor of print. There is a decline in speed and accuracy, and an increase in fatigue, when reading from a screen rather than paper.
Many editors still prefer to proofread from paper, where the errors seem to jump out more than on screen. Many e-publishers state that the vast majority of e-book purchasers print before reading. Also, e-books are much in need of standardization.

A paper version appears to be almost necessary and it is certainly convenient. Many students still cannot get to computers easily and many students do not like to work on the computer for longer hours. Many (including me) are of the opinion that a paper version is much easier to use when preparing for a test or exam.

I won’t talk about the piracy as I don’t think it can be avoided in any form.. physical or electronic.

However, commercial pressure from Internet-based e-book sellers will cause traditional book shops to struggle to remain competitive. Book publishers may still be in charge of the printing presses, but that may soon be irrelevant. They need to find a new role in the Internet age, and those who don't succeed may become increasingly marginalized.
Perhaps the slow response of publishers to digitize textbooks is a blessing. The delay will give educators and others an opportunity to more closely examine the costs and benefits of using electronic books in a classroom setting.

Personally I would want to read bedtime stories from paper books to my children and grandchildren. I do not want to believe that the electronic format will ever become more popular than paper books, I do not want that personal, human touch to go away, I do not want us to become slaves of this electronic age but at the same time I know acceptance of the electronic format will continue to grow.

And I do believe there is room for both.

Current song- Chandni re Jhoom – Kishore

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