From Wired.com’s GeekDad (Oct. 1, 2011):
This week I came across one of the scariest stories I’ve read in some time. It doesn’t have zombies or vampires or werewolves, dastardly masterminds or super-powered villains or even your guy-next-door-who-turns-out-to-be-evil. What makes it frightening to me, actually, is what it doesn’t have: books.
Well, okay, that’s not technically true. “The Future of Books: A Dystopian Timeline” (posted this week on TechCrunch) paints a picture of the future of publishing, and in this world, digital publishing will supplant traditional publishing as soon as 2025, at which point people like me will be the last hold-outs, futilely clinging to our nostalgia for ink on paper.
I mean, it makes sense. Why continue mulching trees to make paper to print physical objects that are heavy, take up space, and aren’t getting purchased anyway? Why have stores that take up valuable physical space when you can store a library’s worth of knowledge on a few hard drives, and carry around a collection in your backpack? The timeline predicts that by 2020 nearly every student from middle school to college will have an e-reader, obviating the need for textbooks.
Read the rest of Jonathan Liu’s blog post HERE