Are Printed Books’ Days Numbered?

 In his 1951 short story The Fun They Had, Isaac Asimov has a boy who finds something really weird in the attic—a printed book. In this future, all reading was done on screens.
When ebooks like the Nook and Kindle came out, there were always women sitting outside the building on break on a nice spring day reading their Nooks and Kindles. It looked like the future to me, Asimov’s story come true. I prefer printed books, but thought that it was because I’m old, and was thirty before I read anything but TV and movie credits on a screen.
And then I started writing books. My youngest daughter Patty is going to school at Cincinnati University (as a proud dad I have to add that she’s Phi Beta Kappa and working full time! I’m not just proud, I’m in awe of her) and when she came home on break and I handed her a hardbound copy of Nobots she said “My dad wrote a book! And it’s a REAL book!”
So somehow, even young people like Patty value printed books over ebooks.
My audience is mostly nerds, since few non-nerds know of me or my writing, so I figured that the free ebook would far surpass sales of the printed books. Instead, few people are downloading the ebooks. More download the PDFs, and more people buy the printed books than PDFs and ebooks combined.
Most people just read the HTML online, maybe that’s a testament to my m4d sk1llz at HTML (yeah, right).
Five years ago I was convinced ink was on the way out, but there’s a book that was printed long before the first computer was turned on that says “the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated”.

 


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