Saturday, February 12, 2011

I love my Kindle, but...

I had a chilling thought while reading this article in The Guardian: What if there was some terrible disaster, man-made or natural, that knocked out all power stations worldwide, making all mod-cons useless because there would be no electricity for the majority of the earth's population?

If the Kindle and other e-readers really do end up making the printed word obsolete, what would we do in the situation outlined above? What would we (meaning, selfishly, I) DO without books to read?

To continue on the "selfish" note, I can only pray that no such catastrophe happens in my lifetime.

Or, on a less selfish note, let's all hope that there will always be books, old and new, as long as human life exists on this planet.

7 comments:

meerkat said...

get into solar power or maybe a dynamo to generate electricity. you can cycle and read at the same time. only problem is who is sitting in amazon selling these kindle books and maintaining their website when TSHTF.

meera

B o o. said...

Watch this ("its a book") video if you have nt already - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4BK_2VULCU

Very appropriate for your post! :)

Kamini said...

So true. I often worry about the fact that so much of our lives - letters, photographs, journals - are stored digitally. What will be the way in which the generations of the future stumble upon their ancestors' pasts? Will all this stuff even exist a hundred years from now? Of course, we won't be around, so no need to worry, I suppose!

Anu said...

No books...that's the stuff WORSTEST nightmares are made of!

Anonymous said...

:) libraries. that's why libraries will survive.

Anonymous said...

With the end of oil era (which is already coming) I think this will happen anyway :/

The real question will be: how these 6 billion "oil born" people will disappear without wars and disorder... Because without oil the normal Earth population will be no more than 1 billion people...

Shammi said...

Anon: How do you figure that?