Our bookless future.
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’
Anyone who's ever dealt with balky hardware and old data formats should be chucking to themselves right about now.
4 comments:
That is the stupidest idea ive ever heard.
I would suggest that the Kindle is an effect rather than a cause. I would also hypothesize that Kindle-users are voracious readers and congenital book lovers who would not, typically, want to wipe out a library. I would also suggest that your average Kindle owner owns (and buys) a lot of actual (non-digital) books.
Of course, this is all based on anecdotal evidence of the three people I know--including myself--who own Kindles, so my evidence is sort of skewed.
I've yet to see a Kindle in the wild here at UCSC.
Clearly Kindle users are going to be readers who buy more than their share of books, just as those dirty file-sharers the music industry is always on about actually pay for way more music than their non-pirate brethren.
The danger with digitizing books is that unlike music, where the corporate power structure's profit motive is behind purchasing physical artifacts, in publishing the profit motive is behind digital. So instead of looking for ways to keep the product 'real' (the music industries recent re-embrace of vinyl, for example) publishing will be only too happy to junk the physical in pursuit of the cheaper & more profitable digital.
The capitalist motivation here is in the easily 'published', distributed (and controlled) digital format.
I don't think books 'work' as well digitally as music does, so their enthusiasm will be somewhat blunted by reality...but their crusade certainly won't lack for motivation and enthusiasm.
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