When looking at the older materials in class on tuesday I began to think about the impact of ebooks on the future of reading. I do not believe this will happen in the near future, but how would items such as the kindle be preserved if society transitioned to a purely electronic means of reading. Technology is constantly evolving and if as a society we were to transition to electronic books would some works be lost in the future due to an inability to access the ebook?
This would likely present a great deal of challenges when it comes to preserving works for future generations. For preservation to exist, society cannot fully abandon print forms. One solution to this problem would be to keep printed versions of books and other works in a sort of database. With this, even if electronic media does come to dominate society, it would still be possible to ensure that books would not be lost to time.
That’s a really good point, a lot of little-known books would be “lost in translation” in the transition from paper books to electronic books. Additionally, I knows books start deleting from kindles after about 10 years (according to Amazon), so you wouldn’t be able to hold onto your books for an endless amount of time either. It’ll be interesting to see if this electronic book fad will hold, or if people will start reverting back to paper once they realize that the electronic kind isn’t quite the same.
I agree and share some of the same thoughts. Seeing the technology of books thousands of years ago begs the question: where will the technology be a thousand years from now? I believe that new technology like ebooks, kindles and the like are the next phase books will occupy. Past that it is impossible to see and very interesting to think about where new technology will put books in the future.