Do we still value Books??

With the internet easily accessible for the most of us & other forms of entertainment like Videogames, music players, movies & videos at our disposal, are books still necessary?

With things like Wikipedia & Google, researching on facts or anything of interest is fast & easy, what's difficult is sorting which information is reliable, truthful & useful. With books, facts can be verified, but not evolve fast enough to cope with the faster medium.

Videogames, music & videos can entertain us yes, but it deprives us in using the most powerful console we each possess, our imaginations. Books can take us to worlds we can't even imagine, whilst the later media just drowns us in it.

Books are considered boring, old, useless, but without them, we could never have reached this point of technological development that we currently are basking in.

Years, decades, centuries, no... Millennia ago, men sought after books or scrolls at the time, for the vast knowledge & wisdom they have "preserved" for those seeking them. There were even times when, your affluence is measured by how extensive your personal library is.

But oh in this time & age, the youth see books only as vassals by which the education system has bound them. Books just gather dust, after the term in which they were needed has passed. Only few people remain who sees books as treasures & friends.

Have books really passed their prime?

What do you think, fellow RomUlites?

 

Although books are what made Humanity, they are indeed losing their value. Many books are available on the Internet, so no more need for the old paged and caped, carriers of knowledge.

I imagine that in a few centuries, one will show a book to that one's son, and he'll ask "What's that?".

 

What's even scarier is, perhaps in the future, when you go to an actual library, all you'll find is a small data storage device that hold every bit of information that humanity ever had & such a library may even be just a small room.

 

You mean a pen drive?

 

No, I don't think a small pendrive, even a four gig one can house every book in the world. America's Library of Congress alone has hundreds of thousands of books in its halls.

 

Not really.. Yeah, most books are being sold online at Amazon for instance, so they're never really library exclusive.

 

Books still have a massive value, yes sure you can get anything on the internet, but ive been a student for years now and trying to read documents and such on PC just gives me a headache. Furthermore most of my research papers had to be referenced to no end, all information and reference had to come directly from books and books alone since most of it couldnt be found on the net. The problem with the net is certifiable information, any idiot can throw up a website with incorrect information of it. This usually adds a whole lot of time to searching for anything since you cant use anything that hasnt been referenced. Wiki really is horrible.Ive got a massive library of books, and i cant ever see books being completely lost and replaced by the net, it just wont happen.

 

Yeah, I want to get programming books or videogame books that will help me or something, yeah you can get them free via pdf online, but I hate to just go on my computer and.. read I would much rather have the physical copy of the book then read it via Adobe Reader.

 

Also, in countries stricken with poverty, books are the only media available for them where they can learn stuff from.

And without books or manuals, how can you set up your computer to have access on the internet anyway.

 

To clarify I indeed value books why when I whent to florida I only bought one game but I bought 3 books.
Its really the youth that are starting to lose faith in books I myself being 14 value books to deepest plots and the ones with thin plots too. I myself wrote a book but I decided not to publish it due to the current fact of is going to buy it. Without books I would not have vast Imagination all though I do forget my commers. Also schools are not trying enough to encourage children to read books or pump there minds with the facts.

 

This might be stretching things, but for a time the Harry Potter books got the youth into reading again, but Hollywood made movie versions of the books which made kids just wait for the next episode, rather than read the books instead.

Also, during the early years of RPG videogames, you were forced to use your imagination as you read the game's text, especially during Character dialogues. I remember when I used to "act out" in my mind character voices, like I'd go deep manly voiced in my head when I read Sabin's dialogues in FF6, then go British with Kaien (Cyan), then go "mysterious Asian" with Shadow. But now that most RPGs & almost every other games have character voices, things became bad again.

 

The thing with harry potter is that it was an addicting book, and kids are curious creatures, they always want to know whats going to happen next, and before anyone else. Ive never met a kid who has seen the movie without reading the book first, theres just a too bigger gap and a too longer wait, kids are curious and impatient by nature, theyll read a book over seeing the movie anyday, so long as the book is out first

 

Welp, HP contributed a lot to make people read and as Almo said, since the movie takes a while to get released, most people read the book ASAP.

I don't think books are losing their value but I won't deny that a lot of people ARE LAZY TO READ. In fact, I always have this problem whenever I want to show someone something, they're just way too lazy. In Deviantart, most people won't even read the artist comments. It's just plain annoying but yeah.

 

Books still have their value even though almost every informative resource is being digitized. Books will also never go away because they are completely independent objects that don't require anything like electrical power just like computers and laptops do.

I buy books time-to-time, and I do read newspapers whenever I can get my hands on them. Just because electronic formats make certain things convenient does not mean it will be able to completely take over it. As I had already pointed out, digitized information still have one flaw - the requirement of an electrical power source in order to access it.

However, I don't watch TV anymore thanks to CNN.com and YouTube. TV is a perfect example of a media with decreased value due to the internet as both require electrical power sources.

 

I still give value to books, as they educate you. Nowadays, people work on internet and on the televison and they no longer need books. Even big bookish nerds now don't use books intead use e-books on their mobiles, DS and what not. As we ascend more towards the future... people will ignore books.

 

people who can afford to, what about those who dont have internet?

 

I don't really think that in a few centuries people won't have Internet.

Or maybe you're right. But they'll have something more powerful than the Internet, then. Actually, if you think about it, what can't we improve?

 

Eventually reading ebooks and pdf over the internet will just get fazed, and then people will resort back to books more. Then there will be more cutting edge technologies, like storing information into your head with a machine, so you can read a book in 2 seconds. Don't believe me.

 

I love reading books... in the future, I'm gonna be happy reading books while everyone gets the stuff inserted into their heads automatically, I'll read for fun, unlike some people

 

Or in the future you could have a story-telling machine. If you don't understand ask the story-teller itself.