Final thoughts

Even though eBooks, eLibraries, the Kindle, the iPad and so on are so revolutionary, I'm still not sold. I've grown up; listening to LP's, reading my parents' old books, writing with a pen and paper... you can't ask me to give them up. Call me close-minded but I think we are losing some valuable by turning everything into digital format. Let's take eBooks for example, and I know it may seem like you heard this millions of times before but the truth is this is what great about books: the smell of them, the feel of them, the fact that you could pass them on to siblings, friends or family, the fact that they grow old with you, you can mark them, write on them, and such. Things like this you can do on a eBook but the palpability of books is just the best. That last characteristic is what I love most about hard copy books, I just have an emotional attachment to the fact that I can touch and feel my book. To give you a further example of this, I can't ever read anything of a certain length or something that I need to analyze on a screen; I have to have in my hands, to touch it, to be able to physically do something to it. To be perfectly honest nothing digital will ever reach the tangibility and quality of the traditional. Just so you know, I do love technology but to some extent and I do not think, I will not be a eBook owner anytime soon because I love Books too much but I've got to say the iPad is growing on me and I can see myself reading the New York Times or a magazine on it because it is way more convenient that having a bunch of them lying around at your house. Digital life is just what is going on right now and if anything it's going to keep getting digital so finding balance between technology and everything else is what people will need to do.

But. . . eBooks, eLibraries and digital lives aren't ALL that bad, right?

I've been bashing the digital, the technological and the Internet for a few posts now but it has more than enough advantages that are enormous and that is why we sometimes overlook its bad sides. The most obvious of the advantages is, of course, convenience. Being that everything today is digital, technological and done through the Internet, we are more efficient, fewer errors are likely to be made, tasks are made easier, etc. Technology has made some fields exceedingly better than they were before. Medicine is one of them. The latter has become so advanced that a doctor can diagnose someone from afar. CT scans help doctors find everything from kidney stones to unfamiliar masses like cancer and so much more. Due to this advancement in technology, a doctor can do way more to help a patient. Eighty to 100 years ago, a person could die from a simple cold and now these benign maladies can be treated just with an over-the-counter drug. Our digital lives aren't that bad if we are able to have more life expectancy! Moreover the world is smaller than ever. It is incredible how it is possible for me to be sitting in my room in Hempstead, New York talking to my parents through Skype about how my best friend in Nimes, France showed me her new apartment the other day. It's amazing how people are so close while being so far away from each other at the same time: another miracle of technology. EBooks and eLibraries are not that bad either, they have amazing storage space and they can't be easily destroyed or burned (Alexandria) as long as you have secure backups of course. These are just the basic advantages; imagine if we went into more depth about other benefits.

Digital lives and their consequences

Ah... how amazing is it that I can sit here in my dorm room and write something that could potentially be read by people from around the globe: the beauty of the Internet and digitalization! Despite their enormous advantages, the Internet and digitalization have various shortcomings. To me, the problem is that not EVERYTHING needs to be digital and it seems likely that’s where we are heading, i.e. eBooks, eLibraries, etc. Some things can be left out of being digitalized. I think that we are becoming so impersonal because everything we do, from socializing to paying our bills, is through these digital devices. If we are not careful, they will take over our lives and we will be governed by technology. I will not be surprised if 50, 60 years from now, our lives look like the lives of the characters of A.I. or The Terminator; maybe not exactly like in the movies, as they are exaggerations, but somewhat similar.

This digital world is turning us into too much of individualists. We are more and more absorbed by our own little worlds which are limited by our TV, computer, eBooks, Blackberries or iPhones, Facebook profiles, etc. Like I said in my last post, we neglect the real people that are around us for the virtual ones that we meet online and as result we become lonely without ever being alone. Furthermore, we are missing out on the small things in life. Our heads are always turned towards a screen. Ironically enough, I'm blogging about this on the Internet and my head is turned towards a screen: but this only shows the ambivalence of this phenomenon. The real solution: balance.

A small part in our bigger digitized lives

What is going on today with eBooks today is just a speck of dust in the way where our lives are heading: THE DIGITAL AGE! In my generation almost all our accessories, all we have is digital: Cell phones, mp3 players, computers, eBooks, etc. About everything we do is either recorded on the internet or gets on the internet in some way. Everything is about connection, being connected all the time. I mean, almost everyone today is about their Facebook profiles, their Twitter accounts, their Flickr accounts and so on and so forth. Personally, I think it's great and I love the fact that we are so connected. What is the price of this constant connectivity though? 

Although we are constantly in contact with one another through the internet, Facebook, Twitter and such, through our phones with text messaging, we are neglecting our face to face relationships. We are connected with pretty much everything and everyone while being extremely lonely without noticing it. All we are really left with is our electronic devices. Our lives are so digitalized that anything that is not digital and technologically advanced is all of the sudden old-fashioned, or “hipster”. As we can see with the rise of eBooks, e-Braries, the arrival of the revolutionary iPad it’s only getting worse. I sometimes find myself wishing that I could use my analog cameras all the time instead of using my digital one, pick up a land line to call someone to hear their voice and not see just their words on a screen. I am indecisive and sort of biased however, because I do scan my film negatives, and upload the pictures to Flickr; I do BBM or text instead of calling. I guess it’s the theory of Darwin applied to this: its ‘natural’ selection.

Ipad: a revolutionary device

The new improved eBook readers are 3 of the most popular platforms for e-readers: the Nook, the Kindle and last and certainly not least, the iPad. We know the Kindle from my previous post: it has certainly improved from its original form, but the Nook and the iPad are the ones that are really revolutionary. The most revolutionary of them all and the one that will radically change our lives, at least per my train of thoughts, is the iPad. It goes beyond being an eBook platform: it's a tablet computer. It's going to change the way we do everything. It’s basically a compact version of your computer, your library, your music, etc. It’s the start of something big I feel. The touch technology has been mastered by Apple and it might be where new technology is going. I have a feeling that in 30 years or less, all of us will own a sort of iPad: a tablet computer in which we will store our books, our music, our documents, emails, calendars, etc. The iPad is a new way to interact with computers and the mode is, I contemplate, that will change how we use computers. The iPad, in my opinion, is as much a threat to the traditional desktop computers and laptops as eBooks are to traditional books. It will not kill it but will certainly revolutionize it.

Is this the end of books?

This new way of reading and storing books is obviously impacting the traditional book industry enormously and in more ways than one. I'm sure avid readers like me are wondering how this affects the traditional book and what is to become of it. I expect that the demand for hard copies will decline eventually. More and more people will buy into the convenience of the Kindle or the iPad. This eBook phenomenon is changing the world of books. Apparently, eBooks don't have such a bad effect on the publishing and the printing industry. Publishers are now willing to take a chance on writers they wouldn't normally take a chance on because the cost of printing will go down as a result of people buying less and less hard copy books. Moreover I think that the reading material that is mostly sold in the digital format is recreational or periodical for now: beach-reading books (which is in fact the most common depiction in eBook commercials), weekly newspapers and magazines; all in all, mostly books or periodicals that are a hassle to travel with all the time, especially when you have a lot of them. The eBook will certainly have a great effect on the book industry particularly because the cost of a digital copy of a book is up to 30% cheaper than that of a hard copy, and that the eBook is utterly convenient. While I still think that the book industry as we know it will radically change with the appearance of the digital book, I still believe that it will take some time before hard copies cease to exist, if they ever. My hope is that books will not die away in my lifetime because I’m not able to let go of my dream of having a very extensive, insightful and erudite library. And I’m pretty sure a lot of us don’t want them to.  So no, this is not the end of books I hope, for now.

[re] Kindle your love for book

A new form of eBook reader is the Kindle, an Amazon developed product. The first Kindle was released in 2007; it was sold out in five and a half hours and was out of stock until April 2008. That surpasses popularity, wouldn’t you say? This version of the device could hold up to 200 non-illustrated titles. Boosted by the acclaim of their product, Amazon released a new version of it in late 2009: the Kindle 2. The latter was even a much better deal than its predecessor. It could store up to 1500 non-illustrated titles; it also had an improved battery life and a text-to-speech option. The latest version of the handheld device is the Kindle DX and has yet improved from the Kindle 2. It has a variety of new features: it can hold up to 3500 non-illustrated titles; you can read in landscape or portrait format. Now you can buy over 400,000 electronic books and magazines that you can download wirelessly straight from the Kindle store. Moreover, the Kindle is now a wireless device; it can also connect on a 3G network.

The popularity of the Kindle has brought out a lot of e-book readers. It has been named one of the 10 best gadgets of the year. It looks like this e-book thing, especially the Kindle, is taking the world of readers by storm with its innovations.