Whenever there’s a breakthrough along the lines of Kindle or some other form of books on ‘puter a massive cry about the death of print publishing chimes like an annoying Nokia ringtone.
And it always makes me wonder if the end of paperbacks will spell the end of the world, mainly because of an article I read positing that the only people planting hectares of trees these days are paper companies.
No more need for paper means all that land will be sold for condos or shopping malls.
Possibly a bit far-fetched and merely the wailings of hysterical luddites? I suppose we’ll only know when we’re gasping for oxygen while reading an online eco-novel that’s not much more than a long-winded ‘I told you so’.
The only problem I have with bookstores closing down and getting all my reading emailed is how I’m going to impress guests without a pretentious bookshelf lined with literature I’ll probably never read.
Less honest book-lovers will bore you with opinions on the smell and feel of a book, the sound a page makes as you turn it, and the high cost of replacing an e-reader when it drops in the bathwater.
Something that turned me off about Kindle and its ilk was a report of publishers releasing ‘3D books’. For instance a novel about the Vietnam War would have paragraphs in which the sounds of gunfire and grenades would play, much the same as if you were reading it in the thick of battle, or on a taxi ride in downtown Johannesburg.
I thought I’d try a 3D novel out before dismissing it entirely, and while reading Moby Dickin bedplayed one of those hippy whale noise CDs and asked my wife to shoot a water pistol in my face.
Needless to say, the only person having fun was Lucy.
And then I imagined online libraries. It would definitely be more convenient, and there’d be no chance of an old woman hissing “Shhhhhhh!” when I giggled at the naughty bits in a Jilly Cooper novel.
The downside would be no more sexy librarian scenario in pornographic movies.
Personally, I need books to be stay offline for a bit longer. If only so I’ve got a few joke- and useless trivia books to stack on top of the toilet cistern.
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