The Slow Death of Books
by Gerald Trites

Slowly, inevitably, books are becoming obsolete. Advances in technology are wreaking their damage, and sometime in the future - five years, ten years, books will be sold only in musty, dingy little stores on side streets and back alleys, perhaps in Art Galleries. They will be bought as historical art or as collectors items, not as critical elements of modern communications.

There has long existed two basic kinds of reading - informational and recreational. Informational reading means reading a book simply to get information that might be needed to perform a task or to build something. It includes most newspaper content, textbooks, most business books, how-to books, reference books, and so on. Recreational reading includes reading novels, poetry, any reading that is done for relaxation or for an artistic experience.

Informational reading is already a dying activity. The internet has seen to that. Google has delivered the final coup de gras. It's just so much easier to find information on the web than it is to find the right book, buy or borrow it and search through the pages for the desired facts. Informational books still exist, but they are no longer an economically viable form of information delivery.

Recreational reading has been dying a slower and, to many, a more painful death. There are still many people who love the idea of "curling up" with a good book. TV off. Computer off. No noise. Existing in a more elemental and satisfying world. Transported to another world created by a creative author, but largely accomplished by ones own imagination rather than by the blare and screech of technology.

But even this last sanctuary of the Gutenburg era is suffering the blast of technological development. Digital readers like the Kindle, new technologies that port digital text onto paper-like materials, a mass of new portable devices, very popular with a mobile and increasigly technological savvy society are all conspiring to bring about the demise of paper based recreational reading material.

The purveyors of the paper books are suffering increased economic dificulty, finding their old business models, as with so many other industries, just don't work any more. Some of them will be able to make the transition to a technological world. Many others will simply disappear.

Some of the populace will miss the old musty paper world. Most will not. The new technologies will offer up a neater and more versatile product. And a more convenient one. People will still read, but in a non linear fashion as they do now with informational reading, jumping from one area of interest to another through links of commonality. From War and Peace to Gone with the Wind to a History of the Crimean War. Treating knowledge as they have information, as a product to be consumed on demand and integrated with all other knowledge rather than consumed discretely. A new world created by the reader, not by the author.

A commentary on the difficulties facing publishing can be found in the London Times Online this week.