What is the future of books?

This was one of the reasons why I said " enough!" to the school where I used to teach. When the school decided that all students should have IPAD and have there all the textbooks therein. Wow, I was a computer education teacher, but I really opposed to this idea. For the reason that I think we are not forming students of hardworkers and resourceful anymore. I strongly opposed to the idea that textbooks should be in a tablet? We are formators of future generation and yet we will form them so dependent to techonology, no more books to carry and so on.. The book themselves are killing their own industries by producing ebooks.

I heard about an Air line company converted the all of their flight instruction manuals to an iPad version. This decision making has multiple benefits. One is that the pilots can easily find the information they are looking by searching faster. The second benefit is that by avoiding the heavy books, it's almost 800 kg luggage, a good amount of fuel consumption can be achieved annually.

Digital books are quite appealing for many reasons, but if we move to that format only, we risk losing books altogether. What happens in an extended power outage, or war, or natural disaster? If there are no printed instructions or guides or even entertainment, it's all gone. If your Kindle develops a problem of any kind, you can't read or get information. I don't see books disappearing altogether, but I expect them to become less common.

The pace with which the usage of paper is diminishing I think paper will be a memory in the near future itself. Using digital technologies instead of papers shows the advancement that the humans achieved till now. The usage these technologies have made it easier to search and carry along wherever we go.

Way back thousand years authors are used to write in a stone tablet then after 1 thousand years they started to use papers, perhaps today the usage of papers will slowly decrease because of new technologies like IPAD and EBOOKS besides minimizing paper production helps to preserve the environment since 1 paper is equal to 1 tree.

I applaud the efforts of making interactive educational apps as supplementary material. Kids can practice reading, math, science, and other subjects in a way that is more enjoyable to them. However, I don't think they should replace real books. If kids can't navigate through books, they will end up losing a lot of information from previous generations. Also, what happens if an app can't be accessed? If there is a technical malfunction? If they lose power? Maybe only certain subjects that are frequently updated should have textbooks replaced with a few textbook copies made available. This way, they can cut costs but still achieve a balance.

We can never stop changes. I no longer want to read books because I am more comfortable in surfing the net for any information I want to. It's easier and it's more practical. Books will still survive not only for the next 10 years but forever. The use of books is the main issue here. More and more people will resort to using the net rather than using books.