E-books - books of the future

The statement of the headline might very well soon be true: as more and more parts of the average person’s life are being transferred in to the world-wide web, there’s no reason why books would be an exception. However, this doesn’t mean I personally support the idea. Don’t get me wrong, the internet is a decent source of information, especially if you need it fast, but people also need something in their lives that is concrete. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a paper-back book or the morning’s paper; it gives you the feeling of actually doing something instead of just watching other people act. You can’t put E-books in your bookshelf for other people to see what is important to you. After all, books can tell a lot about people and their lives.

Another thing that worries me about this E-book system is the possibility of books eventually suffering from the new publishing channel. They might be shortened because no-one wants to stare at a screen for hundreds of pages, or made easier to understand to lure in the bigger audiences. This is in my opinion what has happened to newspaper articles on the internet. The subject is almost never covered thoroughly, because people don’t have the patience to focus on anything for longer than the bare minimum. They want to be told the main points immediately and in a clear, compact way. This leads to everyone knowing what has happened, but no-one concentrating on why.

Some might reason their fondness of E-books by saying that everyone has access to them. In my opinion this is not true, since not nearly as many old as young people know how to use a regular computer, not to mention an IPad. Libraries, which are one of the best benefits our tax money offers us, would become unnecessary because there’s no such service provided on the internet. People might buy fewer books since what use is there in owning a file which will just be saved on a database among other meaningless stuff? Old-fashioned books which have actual pages have meaning, a soul in them. They not only tell a story but have one of their own as well. Books are a source of knowledge, entertainment and strong emotional experiences which make people’s lives better in a simple but significant way.