The Book Is Dead! Essay Example

The Book Is Dead! Essay Example The Book Is Dead! Essay The Book Is Dead! Essay Is this the death knell of one technology, that is Traditional Printing, and the subsequent rise of the next, Digital Media etc? Electronic books, or E-Books, are reportedly currently outselling traditional paper based books generally and newspaper circulation figures are in a long gradual decline. The standard Phone Book is already dead, as British Telecom no longer produce it in a printed format. Is print the place where words go to die? And yet last year the renowned online retailer Amazon announced that for the first time, it was selling more Kindle versions of books than paperback and hardbacks combined, and, here is something that does not get quoted quite so often, sales of print books were still increasing.[ CITATION Jen15 l 2057 ] Recent statistics seem to point to a decline in reading conventional books and other printed material and that technology is taking over in terms of encyclopaedias, dictionarys etc. In fact the renowned Oxford English Dictionary is now only available in print to special order, either in it’s full 20 volume set or as the compact single volume edition. The economics of traditional printing requires thousands of units to be sold in order to see a potential profit for the publishers. They are generally expensive to produce, take up a lot of space, they are not easily searchable, and they are not easily linkable. E-books and pdf ( Adobes Portable Document Format) versions of documents on the other hand are quite the opposite. They are generally very inexpensive to produce, usually in the few hundreds of pounds or less, they can be very quick to produce, and unlike traditional paper based books, they can be quickly searched through and items can be linked between one source and ano ther. In future will the printed book simply live on as art objects and as collectors items? Sherman young in his book entitled ‘The Book Is Dead : Long Live the Book’ states â€Å"that physical books may one day become the