In day-to-day conversations with people I see regularly, I often make little side-notes about how certain things are going to change. The one thing that brings me the most crazy looks is when I say that, within a small number of years, people won’t be buying physical books any more. I completely believe that printing books is a thing of the past. The amazingly hefty footprint left behind by printing millions of pages of content cannot be ignored, and with the convenience of instantly obtaining books, having them everywhere at any time, and having them in a smaller form factor  just makes more sense.

For example, a while back I was sitting in the waiting room for my grandmother to get out of surgery, absolutely bored to tears,  when I pulled out my iPod, opened the Kindle app, and within seconds I had found a book, downloaded it, and was in the middle of reading it. The system was, for the most part, perfect.

Plus, the costs of maintaining book stores and libraries is too much to ignore. In Philadelphia, all public libraries closed down due to the fact that operating them took so much money. The New York Times recently said that it was cheaper for them to send all their subscribers an Amazon Kindle than to send them a physical copy of the paper each day.

So, call my crazy, call me some tech-hippie, but I fully believe that physical copies of books are a thing of the past. Once we get a few little things ironed out, it will all be great. And to the people that say closing libraries will be a mistake, I have a small tidbit to add. The idea of people being able to reach reading material freely is here to stay for a while. Places like the internet public library will see to it that money never stands in the way of someone reading a book. Plus, for others, “renting” might be an option. Think about it: $.99 to read a book within a certain period of time. Less money for us to spend, more money that publishing companies get.

I could go on all night, but I’ll shut up. I suppose that I’ll talk about how TV in the near-future will no longer have traditional channels, CDs will not exist in stores, and other crazy ideas in future posts.

Until then,

as always,

Nathan.