Books as we Know it

Will the printed books be around 10 years hence! 25 years or 50 years! Music became disembodied digital stream of bits a while back. Kindle started a revolution, turned books digital yet mimicked the format of a printed book.  So though the content has started becoming digital the whole experience was of reading a book. Along came iPad. Besides lot of other things it can do,  it  reads books in full color and with animated content. So who needs the books in the format we have been used to since the time of Gutenberg!

Electronic books, in full color, which you annotate too and that can talk to you, show video in full HD seems like an ideal medium for knowledge transmission. Kids growing up in digital environment will latch into these kind of things absolutely naturally. Like most things though the printed book also will run parallel though  at much less volumes than today. But then you never know. How quickly those records, cassettes vanished. very soon audio CDs also will go the same way. The only CDs available will have MP3 recordings on them. So, let's see how it goes.