E-verything

Everything today has an E- in front of it, so it seems. Whether it's e-music, e-mail, e-malls, or even e-books...most everything we have is now becoming apart of the e-world around us. This past week, in class, we were discussing if hard-cover books will eventually go away and everything go to e-books. Certainly, I don't think hard-cover books will go away for quite a long time - it's hard to even imagine! Books are so essential to all aspects of culture, the idea of throwing away a form of it would be difficult to fathom. Though we did do away with stone writing and eventually scrolls. So perhaps we will, in about 100 more years, be done with hard-cover books down the road. Just because we are keeping hard-cover for awhile, doesn't mean we can't slowly embrace the e-world of books. Amazon has an e-reader titled the Kindle (and Kindle 2 has recently come out) that is quite a genius way of reading books. The idea of having text books in such a small device is neat and extremely handy for college students. This device is about as thin as a magazine (imagine!) and is the weight of a typical paperback book. The benefits with this is how you can enlarge text, highlight items, search word definitions and the option of having the text read out loud is even available! For $359, this is quite an item...it would seem that the price would go down throughout the year, especially if more and more companies invest in researching this piece of technology, then competition would go up. Sony has also come out with an e-reader for only $299, that they call the Reader Digital Book ... it has many of the features of the Kindle from Amazon - and even had an event at one point where around several hundred thousand Reader Digital Books were distributed to schools throughout the U.S.
So that is the scoop on the newest in the e-book world! It's very exciting, but I am really looking forward to what will be offered about 5 years from now...who knows how much technology will have advanced by then!