Books are Here to Stay

Books. They are important. I mean the ones you can hold in your hand and pursue slowly, letting the words simmer in your mind. I have nothing against Ebooks. I like Kindle, Kobo,IPads. They have their place. They can store lots of titles without taking up much space on the bookshielf.
   But I prefer to hold something with weight to it in my hand and slowly turn the pages. It is also hard to cuddle up to an Ereader, metal, breakable.
   Yes, over time the paper book gets old and worn and torn. Sometimes they go out of print and before they do it is neccessary to put them into pixels.on disks and CDs. We are seeing that  today... the transformation of bound books into pixels. And even that will pass. Look at what is happening to that form of storage known as microfiche.

Books to be enjoyed

  I am the book reviewer for the Santa Monica Daily Press. http://www.smdp.com/. Most of this discussion comes from the book I reviewed back in June 9, 2010 . It was called "The Case for Books:Past, Present, and Future." by Robert Darnton. It seems to be aimed for libraries and other bibliophites, but it is good reading for thought. We seem to be seeing a transformation from bound books to pixels stored on disks and CDs and Google Book Search. This is somewhat of a good move. But with the transformation of information there is also the possibility of what was added by publishers as the years went by. The classic case in point would be anything we have today by Shakespeare. But we accept the additions to the text, the lines subtracted, words left out. After all, that is stuff of days gone by and no one minds.
   A worning is given that we must be careful of what we accept from the intgernet,. "Students usually download tests from computers without askin gwhere they come from, aqnd they frequestly get garbage," Darnton. points out.
   Still that is no reason not to read.
  More discussion to come.