The end of books is closer than we thought. A short article in today’s Christian Science Monitor discusses a private high school that has replaced the books in its library with a $12,000 espresso machine, three sports bar like TVs, Kindles with e-books, and laptops.
Apparently, the old, hard copy books were not being checked out and read, anyway. Though the article does not mention Google, we look forward to a riposte from Carr. He thinks Google’s giving us the jitters now; imagine adding a little espresso to the formula.
While we’re on the subject of books disappearing, another related piece in today’s mail threatens to amuse, from the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, a review of cartoonist Bruce McCall’s new book, Fifty Things to do with a Book (Now that Reading is Dead).
And our brief survey and latest Reading Crisis entry would not be complete if we didn’t remind readers of our own past post, “What we will miss when newspapers disappear.”
But doesn’t the espresso disturb their nap time?
The Coming of the Toads 
The apocalypse of books is near!? The thoughts of this high school library remind me of the bookstore “Barnes and Nobles,” as this has become a huge study spot for college and high school students. After the bookstore added starbucks as an attraction (which by the way was a very smart idea) I predicted libraries would follow suite, but not high schools. Although, the internet does provide great information for research and topics alike, the fact that the internet provides false information two-out-of-three times, should have been a obvious thing to see before building the techno library. The only false information I find with books is fiction, which is still educational. I’m sure that somewhere in the future books might not be replaced, but rather ignored. Technology seems to be on the roll. Soon, the world of books will be “The Myspace Down-Low” for information.
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I am not going to buy an e-book reader until I have answers to my questions.
Will the owners of the e-book software have a monopoly? Will all publishers have to pay royalties to this software? Will the software owners have the power to keep books out of the marketplace, or “punish” publishers who don’t behave themselves?
Will the concept of owning books be replaced by the idea of renting them? Will the software have the power to go back and modify or remove content?
Clearly the goal of these e-books is to replace, not exist side-by-side, with traditional books. They will have to not only stop publishing all traditional books (which it looks like they are eager to do), but will have to destroy all the used ones, before I am corralled into where my keepers want me to go.
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