Why is it that we still use books today? With technology what it is today, I believe that we could easily start the process of phasing out books out of society. It would be a slow and tedious process, to a certain extent, because we would have to digitize everything, but I think the real world benefits would greatly outweigh the costs.

Today, I was at Office Depot, and noticed they were selling flash drives for $9.99. I think, considering that small, portable drives have gotten so cheap, it's possible for us to begin using hard drives as the new medium for book stores. Can you imagine it? No more wood wasted to make shelves, no more paper needed to make tons of books that may never be bought; just a medium-sized store with a few tables and a counter. There won't be such a thing as a wasted flash drive, since people would only put the books they want on the drives; very cost effective. Basically, what you would do is bring your nifty little drive, pay the person at the counter, and have the relevant book loaded into memory. The tables could have small glass windows with widescreen lcds underneath them, where you could stick in your drive and load up your book. You could just sit there, reading a "book." I could see book stores even encouraging the use of the same drive, by giving 10% discount if you bring your own drive. What about if you enjoy coming to the book store just to read magazines? Well, a portion of every e-book could be loaded into the bookstore's main server, as well as the FULL version of the magazines. I think this method would help consumers maintain most of the privileges that they enjoy in bookstores currently, while at the same time encouraging book sales, by limiting access to full blown novels.

Some people might argue that taking your drive home and reading your e-book on your lcd monitor just isn't the same as reading from a good, old-fashioned book. I will agree: it would be a mighty big change. However, we could minimize the impact of this change by integrating flash drive ports into PDA's. Thus, the PDA's could serve as digital book readers. I think, though the cost might be a little high for major consumers, capitalism would eventually drive the price down so that the majority of the population could own their own PDAs. I think this would reduce the demand of resources significantly: the demand for wood would drop SIGNIFICANTLY. Also, electronics are largely reusable, as well as recyclable. Of course, I know people would be throwing away their PDAs constantly, so they can get the "newest and best" models… can't solve ALL of life's problems, eh?

I think one area that this move would have a huge positive impact on is college life. Every college kid is familiar with the experience of lugging around a gigantic chemistry textbook, along with that book's solution manual, lab book, etc. It's not a very pleasant experience. But if we digitized books? They could just walk around with a drive in their pocket.

I can see two major negatives to digitization: piracy, and people losing work because their jobs have become obsolete. In regards to piracy, considering that "hard" copies of the books would be loaded directly into a person's drive, any license protection on the novel could be hacked. This would potentially drive down sales to a small degree, but piracy of books is already happening currently. I think, all in all, we should still make the move, because the idea just seems more efficient to me. Plus, I think MOST people would still buy books legitimately. I mean, CDs and movies are widely pirated at the moment, but tons of people still go to the movie theaters. CD sales have RISEN since the introduction of mp3s. Plus, the introduction of legal online music stores has helped to decrease music piracy to a large degree among the general public. As for the loss of jobs... well, I'm sure you could think of some jobs that would be negatively affected by this.

I don't know, this is just an idea I was tossing around in my head. However, I see this happening in our very near future. More and more books today are being digitized. As far as I can tell, they're already making this change, but I still think we should be moving faster to transition into completely digitizing literature. I don't know if books would be completely phased out, but maybe they would be limited to archival use? Maybe a few copies of the books would be made, for library use? I don't know…

I don't think we'll ever really stop using paper; it's just too convenient and handy to use. However, if we could limit paper use to just notebooks, organizers, and that sort of thing... we'd still make a huge impact on how much wood we would use per year.