Monday, November 9, 2009

The Rise of the E-book

I follow enough publishing industry blogs to know that a lot of people are seeing e-books as the end of reading as we know it. Barns and Noble resently released the Nook, their new e-reader sure to give Amazon's kindle a run for its money that will also help the worlds largest book store stay in business when people start refusing to shop in book stores.

But tonight on my comute home, I heard a story on NPR that brought the end of paper books into reality sooner that I had suspected. I have always thought that e-books would surpass paper books in market share once kids started getting e-readers at school instead of paper text books. Once school children become used to reading e-books and ever student has an e-reader the transition away from paper books will be impossible. Not only will kids in school consume all their pleasure reading on their school issued e-reader but they will then grow up to be adults fully committed to the idea of e-reading.

Well according to the good people at All Things Considered, there is a private school in Massicusits that has gotten rid of all the paper books in their school library. All the kids have laptops and kindles and the library is investing only in e-books and online refrence material. Right now this is just one private school in New England, but how long will it take before all the public schools across the country are following suit. When kids can't get paper books at their school library - the e-book is here to stay.

I feel so thankful that I got a kindle for my birthday last summer. I would hate to be bested by a bunch of spoiled brat kids.


Joke of the Day
You know technology has taken over your life when you consider your many gadgets friends, but you forgot to send your father a birthday card.

2 comments:

Jennifer Shirk said...

That's an interesting news story that I hadn't heard. It's funny how technology grows. My daughter had computer classes in Kindergarten.

Anonymous said...

Did you make up that joke from personal experience?