Like anything in the world, the e-reader offers society both negatives and positives. The positives? No longer will we have to take the time out of our day to stalk down the nearest newspaper stand, drive to the local bookstore for the latest bestseller, or even pay increasingly high prices for our favorite books. However, all of these pros are cons as well. By using the e-reader, the newspaper printing companies will slowly begin to decrease in number, bookstores will lose popularity as people begin to simply purchase their books at the online Kindle store, and perhaps even some of our favorite authors won't have jobs if all book prices become standardized and they begin to make less money--as if authors can afford to be paid less in general.
E-readers are capable of so many things, but I can't necessarily say that I'm a fan. Yes, I can see their uses--they can be very handy at times--but in the long run e-readers can only serve to harm us. The what-ifs of e-readers are endless. I agree wholeheartedly with Jonas: as we progress further into the technological era, will technology begin to define us? As it stands now, we already have to worry about what computer or cell phone we have. However, I think the future problem of the e-reader extends beyond this. What if society became so dependent on e-readers that we really felt no need to care for our books? Would books or newspapers written long ago be left to simply gather dust and then literally begin to fall apart at the merest touch of the finger? Would society just have copies of all of these great literary pieces on their e-readers, or any sort of technology in general? Then again, formats change. For example, ten years ago people were still using floppy discs, a feature that is not generally offered with new computers today. If e-reader formats were to alter in the same way, there is no way we can be sure that all books, especially those written by lesser known authors, will also be changed to fit the new format of the improved e-reader. And if one day the world experienced such a drastic catastrophe that all technology was lost? We would lose everything, and there might not be any way to attain them again. In one day, cultures would lose everything that defined them, that helped to create who they are and who they once were as a people.
So yes, although the e-reader would present many new technological advances to the world, I think that we would be better off with books that we can hold in our hands, flip through the pages with the flick of a finger rather than a touch on the screen, and have the general knowledge that books will be around for a much longer time.
I would point out that losing vast amounts of important literature in a relatively short amount of time is nothing new to mankind, though, despite being printed on a page. I definitely think the time we could lose great works has the potential of being shortened if in the not-so-near future we become completely digital; it's just that if something like a permanent continent-wide loss of power happens, we probably have some serious problems to worry about alongside the loss of literature.
ReplyDeleteI honestly don't think losing all of our losing all of our literature is something we should fear overmuch. Nobody is going to care enough to convert all the books ever written into electronic versions, plus there will always always always be people like us fighting against it. As long as there's a market for the material version they're going to be available somehow, even if we have to search through second-hand shops like the ones Winston encounters in 1984 by George Orwell.
ReplyDeleteThere is going to be some kind of synthesis between paper books and e-readers; there has to be. I've been thinking lately e-readers which store books as digital files but can print out a paper copy when they need to. This, of course, is probably not possible, but I'm almost positive that there is going to be some sort of synthesis, and hopefully this synthesis will fall more on the paper end of the spectrum with some electronic modifications.
ReplyDeleteI definitely hope so. It's highly doubtful that we'll lose all the books we've ever had because of format alterations, but sometimes what-ifs can be interesting to think about especially if it's regarding something we all obviously care about a lot. Plus, as of right now, e-readers are generally too expensive for every individual in society to purchase them so we'll have books for a while longer yet.
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