BORDERS CLOSING

[CaptO]

I personally hate reading long items on a screen. Anything over about 10-15 minutes of reading is printed out and then read. (Damn the trees! Full speed ahead!) Actually, computers and high speed printers have probably made wasting paper much easier than in the past. So much for our "paperless society". I don't know if books will ever go away entirely, but it certainly is being diminished by electronic media. I had a friend in the Secret Service on the Carter detail who traveled with him around the world (and boy, does that guy travel!) Instead of taking several books with him, he had hundreds on a Kindle. It only makes sense. The one thing that will save books, I think, is the fact that they will never be obsolete. Buggy whips, shaving cream brushes, telegraph terminals, telephone switchboards were all done away with, because the industry they were made for vanished due to their being replaced. A Kindle may show books on a screen, but it's not like it means books aren't read as quickly. A human will read as fast as he had before, just on an annoying screen. Diminished but never replaced - at least in my lifetime. I suppose my kids won't care, perhaps. They've read nothing but real books up to now (ages 10 and 7). I see no reason to change that in the near future.