Ramić Emir

4th year

Magazine

The Future of Print

Will books disappear in the future? This is the question that has been pondering many

publicists students and book lovers alike. In recent years the sales of digital books online

and the closing of a couple of libaries has led many of us to think about the future of printed

books. Although many people are using digital devices for reading books it is unlikely that

printed books will disappear anytime soon because print is still the most superior form of

information storage.

Books have been major information storage and presentation devices for hundreds of years,.

They collected and shared humain knowledge and are to this day the best way to maintain

gathered information.These days there are many devices and gadgets that imitate real books

and which are in their own right a good presentation of books. But can these gadgets replace

real books? Well, for starters I-Pads and and tablets can contain a great deal of information in

them which isn't necessarily a good thing in this case. Imagine that you are on a vacation and

brought with you an IPad containing two hundred books.Suppose your IPad is stolen or

broken and all your books are permanently deleted and you cannot recover them. You lose

the expensive device plus two hundred books which you paid, wheras in the case of bringing

a printed paperback, you lose only the one mentioned which costs approximately fifteen

dollars. The bottom line is print cannot be deleted . Moreover, printed books do not suffer

power shortages and blackouts, and are more resistant to shocks. it is certain that, up to now at

least, books still represent the most economical and flexible way to transport

information at a very low cost.

Considering the usage of digital devices it is very likely that printed books and digital books

will continue to coexist in the future. Even today many people read magazines and

newspapers by electronic equipment, and these two, along with cookbooks and dictionaries,

which are used infrequently only to look up specific passages, are in all probability going

mostly digital. But new technologies rarely replace old ones totally. For example, when the

mobile phone was invented, it didn't kill home telephone. Likewise, after the advent of

the cinema, people continued going to live theatre. People still go to cinema even though

they can watch movies in their homes and we still listen to radio even though we have iPods.

The book in its printed form has a traditional value and it has a special place in our society

and probably will in the future. I'ts in our nature to view objects as material, and many readers

love to have a physical presentation of their book. The feeling of holding your favourite book

in a hardcover edition admiering its design, the sound when they make when you open a new

page. We love filling shelves with them. Books are not just collection of data and information,

they are also beautiful object in themselves, and every one of them is special just because it is

differently designed. With these new technologies there will be many people who will still

keep to the traditional reading of a book because formats to which lots of people are attached

often take a longer time to go away.

There is, however, no point in denying that digital technology that the future brings will

make some changes to our reading materials but also that does not mean that book will ever

be in danger ot total extincion. Just the fact that books in their printed form had been with us

for hundreds of years is enough to assure us that they are still too important to our society to

give up on.