What Is a Book?

A book is simply what you make of it. Some people read books to laugh, some people read books to learn and some people read books because they're bored. A book is what you make of it. With this whole "technology" age that we are starting to be drowned in; a book might change form or published in a different way but the overall meaning of a book will never change. The print industry is dying, period. We still might have millions of books being published in print everyday but the fact of the matter is, in the future that beautiful smell of fresh pages will be beside us. Kindles, iPads and other technology are taking the industry by storm and shaking things up a bit. This is a capitalistic society so whatever is making the most money will stick around. Sorry for the print industry but in reality, it is dying. Ebooks are hitting all-time highs and soon they will start to sell more than what is being currently circulated, so with that, why would this capitalistic society go back or try to go back to regular print versions of books? This economy runs on this thought, "don't fix what isn't broken," so if Ebooks are working, then stick with them even though it might be a taboo decision. Me being in journalism, a "newspaper guy" if you will,  I feel why people are getting upset with Ebooks and why they "ruin" a classic print industry because the same thing is happening with newspapers and their form of print. I have come to learn that you can't compete with technology, it is impossible, I guess that's why it's called technology, because it is smarter than all of us. I always used to feel nervous or apprehensive about becoming a journalist because of the notion that "newspapers are dying" but now, I really have formed a different opinion, the opinion of reality and really that's how everyone should start to feel, books or newspapers. In 20 years there will be no more print newspapers and probably very few or no print versions of books. That's reality right there, technology will take over and in the newspaper buisnesses' case, it will be totally irrelevant. What technology does is makes our lives easier and if you think about that harder, it steals jobs away. Using the newspaper example, the Internet is the death of print journalism (also a bad economy can adhere to that), that's technology isn't it? Newspapers might be only online, on an iPad, whatever the case is, but what won't change is the purpose of a newspaper. Just think about in 20-50 years where this world will be, I have no idea what will happen but the one thing that is for sure, is it will be different, just like the print industry is evolving into something new. In both the newspaper business and in the book industry, sure there might be different platforms to read from but really does that change the "meaning of a book?"