I am convinced that bound books will soon be as prevalent in literature as compact discs are in music. It's true, you can still buy CDs, but music has become highly digital. I'm curious how many people reading this blogs still use CDs frequently. Maybe there are more people than I would guess. With the amazing storage capacity of MP3 players and iPods, CDs only seems to serve the purpose of being ripped into digital form.
It seems that ebooks are moving books more and more into obscurity. I still love traditional books, but as the technology improves and becomes very affordable I find ebooks to have many attractive advantages. Prices are cheaper, purchasing is immediate and can be done anywhere, notes and highlights can be stored, words can be instantly defined, video and other multimedia can be integrated into them and all of my books can be kept in one place. In fact, it is the same place where I keep all my music, have my todo list, store my passwords, do my banking, study the Bible, play games, listen to podcasts, and budget my money.
In terms of education, textbooks are beginning to appear in electronic format from major publishers. Textbooks are very expensive and need to be constantly updated. When textbooks become digital schools can purchase them at a lower cost and pay for the updates without having to through out the old textbooks. In addition, these textbooks have the possibility of being interactive and attractive to the students.
I am definitely one of those people who still buy CD’s, and basically for the sole purpose of ripping the music to MP3. I often buy music, but find the encoding cumbersome when I want to put the music on multiple players, and computers. I also find CD’s a better storage format for my vehicle. I have used blue tooth, and radio transmitters to play my MP3s off of my IPod, and phone, but have found them unreliable. I think books will have a similar path. I think there is still comfort in the tangibility of books, and CD’s, however the digital formats will become more prevalent. The convenience, and compactness of the storage cannot be surpassed in the classic form. There is definitely the advantage of being able to edit, and update the file as well.
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