Thank you so much for your comments. I will be sure to get in touch with you. I am very interested in at least reading more about future studies. Once I graduate from my MLIS program I might very well be interetested in taking the online course you mention. The coming three months are very busy for me, so it will probably be after that.

My opinion on the future of the book is that we will see less and less reference resources in paper format. I really think that a lot of the standard reference books will become digital. They’re so costly and slow to produce in paper that it just makes economic sense to put out electronic versions instead. My library tries to buy electronic whenever possible and people also seem to prefer that. I suspect that there may continue to be a *few* reference sources that are real classics that will hang around for a while, though.

Fiction, though, I think will stay in paper for a while. You can read a paper book on a plane when you aren’t allowed to use electronics. You can read a paper book in the pool. You can throw it in a bag and not worry about if it’ll get damaged. I think that paper fiction will stick around as a luxury item for some time.

Non-fiction is a bit muddier for me. I’ve yet to find a really useful electronic version of a non-fiction book. However, a majority of non-fiction isn’t meant to be read cover-to-cover the way fiction is. It might just be that the electronic non-fiction books I’ve seen aren’t as useable as they will be in the future.

Of course, if you talk with the student, they want anything they need for their paper to be in elecronic format and searchable. So if we’re looking at that attitude, it may be that we’re closer to electronic formats that I realize.

I’ll be in touch in November.
Thanks,
Lauren