Will printed media ever go away?

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I don't think it will go away, but I can see printed matter being pushed even further to the periphery than it is already. As with this school...

Headmaster says eliminating books in library is working fine (link)

And this was three years ago. These kids are going to school in an environment where printed matter is probably going to seem almost an oddity. When I first heard about this I was kind of appalled, but it doesn't seem to have hurt the school in any way.

I like print, as you don't need power, and is readable without any special equipment. You can still read the print manuals of things made 30 to 40 years ago still, and without any difficulty, you can't say that about computer files.

This has already been studied to death. Almost everything in an e-reader can be recycled. After one year of use an e-reader is more eco-frindly then paper books, and they are reducing the carbon footprint of e-readers all the time. So it will only get better.

Please stop cutting down trees for no good reason. We need the oxygen. That will stop global warming. Paper needs to be outlawed, not e-readers.

Are e-books an environmental choice?

How Green are E-Books and E-Book Readers?

Books vs. e-readers: Which are more eco friendly?

If you include -written media- i.e. darker ink on a lighter surface the answer is probably no. It is much easier to scribble something of a pad or any handy piece of paper that is lying around than it is to crank up a computer or flip open an iPad. No batteries included. The only disadvantage is that one needs light.

And it is well that the written document will be around. Various electronic formats become obsolete and disappear from common use over a period of time. How many of you folks have documents written in 5 bit Baudot? Not many I would say.

If the written form goes away then we will be losing historic documents of great importance.

Think of the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. That would be lost almost certainly if they had been in some kind of electromagnetic medium. Almost all the history we have is based on either primary artifacts or written documents (ink on paper, lines grooved into stone or mud brick). The Babylonian and Sumerian Documents, wedge shapes symbols grooved into mud, latter hardened to brick has the best staying power of all written material. We have some going back 4000 years. Do you think electromagnetically stored data would last long,, especially given the fact that entire civilizations collapse from time to time. A technological collapse could mean loosing vast amount of electromagnetically stored data because no one knows how to translate it.

ruveyn

One thing E-readers have going for them is portability. I used to lug around 50 pounds of books to school back in the day. Reducing that to under a pound is nice.

That being said I drop my Kindle on the bathroom rug and the screen cracked. So I don't have an E-reader ATM.

If they do we are gonners - read 1984 people, while I have my own hard copies of things and can hide them they can't change what is real. Even if they can fool almost everyone we can keep the truth someplace. But once they have all media in their control - they control what everyone will see and read and what is defined as "truth". Already if you need to find something google provides it by popularity of by whoever pays them the most to push it up the search algorithm facts no longer determine reality anymore.

and I can't tell you how much digital stuff I have lost due to backups not working or failing.

This.

I've been mocked for believing in the "original 13th Amendment" which states that no person holding a title of nobility shall be allowed to hold public office. This is because lawyers and bankers are granted the title of "esquire" which is only gained from the Crown of England. Back then, colonists could still hold allegiances to the Crown but be "citizens" of the new nation.

Most scoff due to a lack of proof, but those working to prove it existed had to dig through state archives and find old copies of legal texts. Most states includes a current copy of the US Constitution (with amendments) in their statutes. It took a while, but these people found (and got certified copies) from very old state statute texts that showed that the original 13th Amendment did indeed exist.

As the vast majority of people know nothing about the law, it was no big deal to omit the 13th and move the others up a peg. How or why it was done when it was done is still unknown, but it wouldn't be in the texts if it wasn't so at that time. If it had been repealed, it would have been repealed by a later amendment, not just mere omission.

The same was true about the legality of the passage of the "income tax" amendment. Getting certified copies of what was returned to the Secretary of State from each state proved conclusively that the amendment was not ratified. The only court case to address this evidence directly stated that the income tax had been in place so long that negating it due to fraud would be against "public policy." No other court has ever touched the matter...even though a fundamental rule of law is that fraud can not be allowed to profit.

No. Digital files just aren't the same as a physical book you can hold in your hands with pages you can turn.

And underline, and high-lite and make marginal notes in and fold page corners down. And just try curling up under covers with a computer.

Maybe these things can be -simulated- on a computer projected book but it is not the same.

Ink on paper has its own permanence. Print image on screen if the projection of an electromagnetically encoded file. Over the course of decades and centuries the means of projection become obsolete and lost As a result many important documents will eventually fade from history unless they are physically printed or photographed.

ruveyn