If you are saying to yourself, “That sounds horrible. I hope books do not go away,” I ask you to consider the world’s poorest and most remote kids.

The manufactured book stunts learning, especially for those children. The last thing these children should have are physical books. They are too costly, too heavy, fall out-of-date and are sharable only in some common and limited physical space.

Paper books also do not do well in dampness, dirt, heat or rain. Not to mention that 320 textbooks require, on average, one tree and produce about 10,000 pounds of CO2 in manufacturing and delivery. This makes no sense. Kids in the developing world should not be sent physical books.

The only way to provide books to the 2 billion children in the world is electronically. You cannot feed children or clothe them electronically, but you can certainly educate and provide hope with these weightless, sizeless and mostly costless 1’s and 0’s.

Therein is the most practical reason that books cannot have paper pages. From here on in, it gets more subtle.

Right now, a paper book is undeniably more comfortable to read than a computer display. Furthermore, the physical book and the library are emblematic of and loved by a literate and informed society. The library is also a gathering place and social venue.

To suggest books are dead is considered heathen or geeky or both. And while today’s reading experience on an e-book is less than perfect, the basic concept is the right direction. They never go out of print. There is no marginal cost in making more. They are delivered at the speed of light. They take no storage space. They can be automatically translated. And, who knows, someday we will be able to squirt them directly into our heads without even reading.

When people argue against digital books they tell me about touch, feel and smell. There is a certain romantic conceit taking place. In this sense, the emergence of digital books is like indoor plumbing. Some people argued against indoor plumbing on the force of the damage it would do to the social fabric of a village (if the women did not meet daily at the river’s edge). Likewise, people will argue that the death of books is the death of a literate society.

continue… http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/100826/ebook-digital-books