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.

There's education and then there is Cybercation

Nowadays we're moving more and more into the cyber world and everything is becoming more and more involved with the virtual: even education. More and more schools are digitalizing their courses (which seems absurd to me because it almost defeats the purpose of education) and also their libraries. Can you imagine a school without real books in the libraries or libraries at all for that matter where you can do some research and stuff? I sure can't! Some schools are even changing their libraries into learning centers with computers where you can do your research.

I know, I know: it saves money and it is less time-consuming then having to go through a million books to find one or two that you really need. I get it; call me old-fashioned but I would rather do that than spend hours and days looking through an electronic library. Don't get me wrong, I spend a lot of my time on the computer every day, but I can’t really study with a computer; I get distracted, whereas at the library there's not a lot of ways to get sidetracked: you are actually there for the sole purpose of doing research and/or getting homework done and you don't have Facebook or any other sites to distract you. You do the research and then that's it. Maybe it's my short attention span but I cannot deal with the virtual when it has to do with serious things like libraries, books, etc. because I just like the traditional version of these kinds of things. Moreover I think they were far more effective in their classic form.  A library without books is a ridiculous idea anyway.