While in conversation with a colleague about the tragedy that is the death of the written word, with things like e-readers and Amazon kindles it won't be too much of a surprise that within a few years book retail will be a dead business. This is for two main reasons, one is that "E-books" are often much cheaper especially with copyright expiration on dead authors, meaning many classic novels are now free. The second reason is that books take up quite a bit of space in the tangible world, where as on a database they become layers of compressed information, meaning that whole libraries can be condensed into just a few gigabytes. This gives us the choice between dedicating lots of shelf space to our favourite reads and simply keeping them stored as information on a tablet which more than makes it's money back when compared to high-street prices of books. However one might argue that this is not the 'death of the written word' to which I agree, more of a reincarnation into the digital era, where if anything they'll be further immortalised. Although with things like Audible, and Librivox where one can simply download a book and have it read to them. Which is cheating frankly, it takes all the effort out of reading the book and the soul is stripped from the novel, as well as making literacy redundant. But if the technology is available, why should I take the effort of lifting up a big, heavy copy of Harry Potter and risk straining my eyes on reading the words on the page when I can fall asleep to the soothing voice of Steven Fry reading "the goblet of fire". My solution, get people with annoying voices to read the books, then people won't find it so easy to put up with.
"books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory." Franklin D. Roosevelt.
