The future of books
At a dinner party recently after I revealed the fact that I was a software developer for a Library Management System the person asked me what I felt the future of books was. Their interest was primarily in respect to what impact ebook readers like the Kindle might have to libraries and books. Well this is a pretty open ended question and I would like to divide this into numerous topic areas. Although this blog post will only scratch the surface I am hopeful it will emphasis that it is a much more diverse future pattern than many "death of the library" posts are suggesting. I feel the main areas for discussion in terms of libraries and ebooks are as follows; Fiction versus non-fiction, public versus private libraries, technology change in respect to electronic reading devices, first world versus the rest of the world, reference versus study material. Fiction versus non-fiction If we look at current ebook sales, verses physical copy sales we...