OK, I admit it, I have a vested interest in print, but shouldn't we all?

There are certainly various elements of communication that can be served by electronic media, facebook, twitter and other information that has a very short life span. There is, in my view, some very compelling reasons for print, particularly books and newspapers whose days in the minds of some people are numbered.  I am quite surprised that more people, particularly in the publishing industry aren't championing for the survival of print.  I for one, am not throwing in the towel.

Print in the form of books and newspapers offers the only sure fire record of events, culture, finance, life as we know it into perpetuity.

Think about it.

100 years from now, where will the information from 100 years ago be recorded? Got any old floppy disks kicking around? A high density micro disk? A zip disk?  Even the younger than 40 crowd is saying "huh".  Devices to read these disks are extinct, and that took less than a decade. My point, changing techologies happens in the blink of an eye. Contact senior people at a university or city library, the national archives, they have got to be worried about this. They might be thinking of creating a standardized format that everybody will use. (ie. digitizing info) How do you standardize electronic data into perpetuity? Impossible! Don't know, hope they do.

There are a number of  interesting "Electronic Readers" and I suppose they have their place... but can they really replace the tactile feel and readability of a book? And like all electronics, obsolescence is built in. We might have to re-think GREEN if this is the way we're going. Plastic is plastic, is plastic - period.

Further, there appears to be a growing body of research that shows that the brain is better able to retain information read from ink, print on paper as compared to a screen. So, what we know now evolved from printed (carved) records on tablets, etchings in caves and on rock faces etc, and from print on paper.

100 years from now... hmmm... well, maybe it won't matter. Or will it?

- Dave Freisen