Doomsday: The Ultimate Case for Ebooks

I just went to see the new movie, 2012.My review in a nutshell: the effects were everything you have heard they were, the script one disaster movie cliché after another: divorced family, scientist no one believes, up to the last minute solution, corruption vs. self sacrifice. My favorite line in the movie, I think, was "If you want to give up your space on this ship to one of those workers down there, go right ahead." He doesn't.

The very best thing about the movie is that one of the two protagonists is a novelist, and an unappreciated one at that! You go!

Anyway, without really pulling a spoiler, let me just say that part of the story is the desire to preserve human culture. Early in you see the president's daughter helping to switch the real paintings in the Louvre with fake ones so that the real ones can be preserved. It occurered to me, being far more into books than art, that ebooks could be the best way to preserve the collected literature of all our heritages.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before" it's just not the same, you want something made of paper to hold in your hands. Go for it, nobody is stopping you. But as literature is intellectual rather than physical we can preserve the essence of it in digital form, which takes up a lot less space. A lot less! I'm not actually expecting Armageddon, but there are just so many good reasons to create digital copies of every book we have. This is just one.. if the final one.

So my hat is off to all those who endeavor to save the great writing of the world, whether for posterity or for some Brave new World. As the other protagonist says of the novelist's book, "The man who wrote this book may not even be alive but thanks to his book, human culture will be preserved."

You betcha!