Can technology turn over a new leaf in the book?

Books have come a long way with the advent of the internet. With the dawn of the e-book came the invention of several e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle. Logical progression? Perhaps, but the cost of an average Netbook today works out to be cheaper than a Kindle.

A friend of mine showed me that there was an e-book fair going on in a website. This was a novel concept. Yet what it turned out to be was a list of PDFs you could download from a website (without thumbnails even!). Somehow, going through an e-book fair failed to have the same amount of serendipity that you have when visiting a real book fair. I went to a book fair last weekend and I literally had to get my hands dirty digging through piles of books, something you don’t do online, in fact in a few minutes and clicks I was out of the online book fair.

This made me start thinking. What is in store for the book in the future? Technology has definitely made an impact on word-smiths, what with word processors having replaced pen and paper for the average author. The internet has become a boon for authors today. Every leading author has a website to promote their books and blog about how they are writing their next novel. You can now even pre-buy a novel as is the case with the next Dan Brown thriller, The Lost Symbol from Amazon.com and visit the book’s website even.

On the tech front, there is talk about flexible displays that mimic the feel of a book, which is an interesting thought. E-book readers haven't caught on due to their steep prices. Perhaps something in today's Netbooks could be adopted for a cheaper e-book reader?

The internet is also a bane, what with the number of illegal e-books one can download – scanned copies of originals, its likely to hit publishers sales. A colleague of mine prefers to get his books this way, printing out a few chapters at a time and reading them.

So for now the internet largely remains as a medium that promotes books and technology is yet to find a substitute for the good old book that you can snuggle up with on a rainy day. Which is altogether not too bad a thing.