So much of our lives is now spent on screens, but books have quite stubbornly withstood this trend.
We are often told that technology is the inescapable progression of things, an important enhancement that they would not endure without, but is this actually correct? It is an easy myth to buy into, we have all skilled how cell phones have made our lives easier, providing us access to more things than we understand how what to do with, however we also know how it has damaged us also. And lots of things have in fact quite stubbornly resisted digitalisation, like books. Although it may have been anticipated that online books would make their print predecessors a distant memory, that has actually not taken place at all, perhaps speaking to the limits of digitalisation and blowing a book-shaped hole in the myth of technological progress. Individuals like the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon books might understand how books have actually resisted being technologically updated.
So much of our lives now exists online. From our work to our entertainment and our shopping, the internet now touches almost every part of our lives. Although the internet has certainly made a great deal of things a lot easier and even more available for a great many individuals, it does take away from some things. Shopping for beautiful books in a lovely little bookshop, for example, is infinitely nicer than simply striking 'order' when buying them online. People like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones would probably appreciate the joys of offline shopping in bookshops.
In this day and age we spend so much of our time looking at screens. Our work is very often on screens, and they are becoming a much bigger part of our working life, and the way that we relax tends to use screens, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they ae becoming an even bigger part of our relaxation too. For many of us, relaxation is associated with seeing movies or tv, all of which is done on a screen, or maybe checking out a book, which had actually managed to avoid the monopolisation of the screen until rather recently. Books are among the oldest technologies that we still use today, with the book as we know it today being pretty much unchanged for about two thousand years now. Although eBooks might have been sold as the unavoidable progression of the book, perhaps having at least something in your life that you do far from a screen is good reason enough to stay clear of them. People like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books would probably appreciate the appeal of reading a book without the requirement for a screen.