Gadgets and Gizmos have indeed brought a revolutionary change in the publishing industry especially the books. Gadgets like Kindle and Apple’s hottest selling Tablet iPad has revamped the way we use to read our books and a concept of bedside book is somewhat getting replaced by the digital version of it.
Physical Books to Disappear Soon
According to a renowned Tech Mogul, as the tablets computers and e-book readers are transforming as a common consumer electronic device, physical books will disappear more sooner that they were expected to be. The founder of the famous campaign ‘One Laptop per Child’, Nicholas Negroponte in an exclusive interview to a TV channel said that with the inclusion of electronic book readers in our daily lives the days of Physical books are very numbered.
According to Negroponte, the physical medium will be over within the next five years. The physical medium, according to the Tech magnate, cannot be distributed to a wider range of people, he quoted the example of Africa where almost half a million people want books but distributing the physical variant is indeed a cumbersome task. Negroponte strongly emphasized on the fact that his organization One Laptop Per Child Program put 100 books on each laptops, and they also send 100 laptops to each village. So that particular village has a total of 10,000 books. He also said that when it comes to this particular fact of adopting the e-books platform, the developing countries have a more consistent and eager interest as compared to the developed countries and people of the developing countries are adopting this electronic realm of books more swiftly.
Negroponte also cited an example of cellphone usage in Africa; according to him Mobile phones were more popular in countries like Uganda and Cambodia because over there people were not having the facility of phones. On the other hand, countries like U.S. and other developed countries had phones so they adopted cellphones slowly. So if the same case is followed in the e-books domain, these under developed or developing countries will adopt these e-books way faster than U.S.
Negroponte found the program One Laptop Per Child way back in the year 2005 with the clear goal of providing one internet enabled laptop to every school going child in the developing parts of the world, mainly in Africa. Organization with the help of tech companies created the laptop named as XO. The laptop has a price tag of $199 and can be purchased from the webpage www.laptop.org/en/.