Do we still value Books??

Even, I never loved books since my childhood don't know why I changed my mind maybe my mother's aphorism might have had some impression... Besides books the only thing I'd like is Wikipedia, everything is there that you would prefer to read.

 

Some scholars and scientists believe that if the dinosaurs didn't die out there would be dinosaurs much more intelligent and advanced than we are, I think they were raptors or something...

 

Some birds would be considered raptors, evolving from those types of dinosaurs, but who's to say they aren't more advanced than us?

 

Birds do have an edge on us humans:

1. Bird's eyes are atleast ten times more acute than ours.
2. Some migratory Birds have a unique internal navigation system that aids them in long distance flights.
3. They can fly (well most of them do)

 

4. They have bird AIDS (Bird Flu! )

 

Hmm.. books are good for School.. And my mom looves reading. i must say i like reading some times

 

You know guys, you only say that books are lame or reading sucks just because it is often being forced on you. Like in school, you are made to read & read & most of the time, the things you read don't interest you. But believe me, if you find a book that really interests you, even if it's hundreds of pages thick, you'll want to continue reading through it til the end. If only we were given the choice to read only stuff we want, then reading wouldn't have to be a major pain.

 

Exactly, some macho people in my class hate being forced to read, but when they go to the library for English, they read so many books that interest them.

 

Like Stephen King's: The Stand, the Complete and Uncut edition.... Long but good....

 

While digitized books (e-books) are easily redistributable, you can easily get them, easily search within them and they consume no physical space themselves, it is tiresome to read on a monitor.
Some people rather print the e-book but it is easier (and faster and cheaper) to convert it to human speech using some Text-To-Speech (speech synthesis) program.
Then you can listen to your book (saved audio file) on your portable device and save your eyes. As a casual amateur programmer, I made myself such a program and tweaked the voice to sound like some radio speaker's voice (low pitch - that way computer voice is most natural sounding). Conversion of text file to audio takes only few seconds and it is far more enjoyable to listen than read on screen. There are numerous such free programs.

However nothing beats the 'feel' of real paper book.

New e-ink LCD technologies look promising (http://www.eink.com) but there is something in flipping the pages that cannot be properly emulated

 

I know i prefer reading a book over reading a .pdf. Although, i wouldn't mind a data-slate or data-pad.

 

I prefer a regular paperback book myself, but I do read PDFs if I'm too cheap to buy or too lazy to borrow books. Nothing beats a good book. Not even video games

 

I'm sure 70 years ago or so, people were saying the same things about bicycles and radios and newspapers. Will they go away because we have cars/television now? I mean newspapers can take hours to bring you coverage of an event, radio and tv have you there almost instantly. I don't think books will ever entirely die out, but I do think they will fade into the background a bit more as it becomes cheaper to make animated movies and new mediums for ebooks become available.

 

I guess it must be me being old, but has anyone read "Farenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury? First published in 1953 it tells the story of a land where books are banned and burnt (451F being the combustion temperature of paper).

It raises some very interesting concepts as to what you are and are not allowed to know. All information is controlled digitally by the government and free thought is suppressed. Does any of this sound familiar 55 years after it was written?

The premise of the story runs that people rebel in their own way and become books themselves, outcasts, but carrying on the tradition of story telling.

Books will always have a place in our house as I teach Little Man, Books are Knowledge. You can't beat having a wall filled with decorated colourful spines which you can pick up and put down at your leisure.

Granted, these can be placed on disc, DS, MP3 and occupy a lot less space, be accessible at the touch of a button, but what happens when you drop it into the toilet? Yes, you can back it up, but how many people bother? Subsequently that Sunday afternoon you spent downloading £5000 worth of books is lost and nobody thinks twice about it.

Books should be respected and appreciated, lets face it, you wouldn't wipe your hard drive of all the games you've downloaded would you? If you had the similar amount of downloads sat on your shelf bought from a shop, the first thing you would do is increase your contents insurance!

Respect books, and they will return the favour time and time again, generation after generation.

Squigs.

 

Kinda reminds me of religion, especially christians in the Dark Ages... Those retards set us back Centuries, just so they could use their petty little politics...

Oh yeah, you can drop books in the toilet too!

 

I believe books are still valuable and the internet doesn't hold ALL books. They're more reliable in a sense because some of the books that were uploaded on the internet may give corrupt facts or just may be made so that people could read them and be misinformed. Anyhow, books are more reliable in a sense, you can also carry them around easily, I mean if I had a book on understanding how to Work out properly, I'd rather carry a book than a labtop to carry around, though, I can't disagree that people have valued books less over time, still, I feel books a more comfortable way of gaining information.

 

......But that tends to happen one at a time and the book you drop isn't likely to have cost the £120 or more you paid for your IPOD or PDA. Besides which, if you had paid that much for a book, I very much doubt it would fit down the toilet!

Who would need a book on working out after carrying a laptop around day after day? Sorry, slightly off topic, but I can see your point. Why carry all that information when ultimately we can only read one thing at a time.... that thing being a book directly about what we want to learn or more specifically, a story we wish to read.

Squigs

 

You two will completely clog the toilet if you continue like this ;D

Back to topic: today "book" is called a lot of things. A meaning "book" will probably lose its meaning as we apprehend it now so perhaps in a near future your kids will say "book" to some holographic device which displays educational movies and documentaries... In similar fashion as in the past they said "car" to a carriage and today we say "car" to an automobile while in the future they will probably say "car" to some hovering platform/craft.

 

Best things about a book over an ebook.

-You can sit on / drop a book without it smashing.
-If book does get destroyed (somehow) it didn't cost that much anyway(for the most part).
-Books don't run out of batteries.

I'm sure there's more, but I couldn't be bothered thinking.

 

Oh no! You should have told me earlier! Where's the plunger! :

Soo... books have many uses, for example, a book could last a hundred years but not a computer, give it 20 years and it would stop working..