Endangered Species: Book, and All That Implies

The book, as we know, it is on its way out.

This is not a bad thing. It isn't good either.

The ease of proliferation for the e-document is fueling a multifaceted revolution - one with tentacles in political, socio-economic, educational, religious, artistic and technological pies, just like the printing press did hundreds of years ago. The effects will be felt for hundreds of years, assuming we bipedal mammals are around that long. This much is obvious.

It is also burning down the old ecosystem of pamphlets, CDs, churches, silkscreens and leather-bound volumes. This is more complicated.

The new tech shuts down old jobs, even as it creates new ones. More than that, it doesn't replace jobs; it creates openings for new roles, and ones that don't necessarily pay as well.

People like books. There's something that approximates permanence in holding a hard copy. For a long time, I was partial to owning hard copies of all the music in my library. For the same reason, I still carry a phone that has physical buttons on it. I don't trust anything that can literally disappear at the stroke of a magnet.

Its existence is sadly temporary.

It's true, there's no such thing as permanence. It's an illusion, created by living just a little too much in the moment. Right now, the book is a book and it's real. In less than a millennium it'll be dust, and the content will probably be irrelevant long before that, with a few notable exceptions.

Still, I'm inclined to hold on to a few paper books. There are some that perennially return to a list of Shit You're Not Allowed To Read, depending on your time and place. Those are the hard copies I wanna hold onto. Just in case. I've read em already, but there's a whole new generation of readers coming up who might not want all their Facebook friends knowing they just bought Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World or Deterring Democracy on Amazon. Not when the Verboten Books list comes around again anyway.

Jail and Fire:
They're good for what ails ya.

And even if you do want people to know what you're reading, you might have trouble finding copies for your kindle/e-reader/iPad/etc.

Then again, forbidden fruit tastes better, right? And therefore, sells better. And the purveyors of digital media aren't necessarily in it for their health. Hard to say what's gonna happen.

And this doesn't even address what's happening to the whole economic model, seeing as free shit is so easy to find on the interwebz. If the shit's just free, what sort of regulator will emerge?

The un-market is flooded.

See you in another present.