Where has all our paper gone?

Technology always has something new. It's boundless and unpredictable, boldly challenging the traditional and the tried-and-tested. Digital photo albums and on-line journals (blogs) like on Multiply.com or Friendster.com have gained a massive following since their introduction and are widely used in place of their binded paper counterparts. Technology has affected even the basic book, a 500-year-old published material and a fundamental part of our intellectual lives. Technology's brainchild: The electronic book (e-book).

With the rise of e-books, are we really expected to chuck our beloved paper treasures and shift to electronic words? Oddly enough, yeah. Just as the iPod has replaced what used to be cases and cases of music CDs, e-books just might replace the paper books.

Instantly, some of you might mutter, "They can have my hardcover when they pry it from my cold, dead hands." Okay, so there is something appealing and familiar about the look and feel of paper. It's not going down without a fight.

But consider the advantages of e-books. An e-book may be an electronic device, which can store about 10 to 20 book-length texts, with special features to make reading convenient. In layman's terms, an e-book may refer to the e-text itself, the words, which is what is downloaded from the Internet. This text and numerous collections of it may be stored and carried in PDAs, laptops, computers and even cell phones.

They're great for bookworms, business travelers and students with heavy backpacks. You can read e-books silently and in the dark, like when your roommates are asleep and wouldn't want the light on. You can also download your own documents. Lawyers, for example, can store case documents and court opinions on one e-book. And those heavy hardbound codals and SCRA? They could fit easily and conveniently as e-books. The electronic text of newspapers are highly accessible on the Net and when one wants a back issue, the text is usually still available in the archives as a cached file.

You can buy and download e-texts instantly, without browsing through the bookstores, which hardly have the rare titles anyway. And then here's the best part: They're at bargain prices! For example, after a friend recommended books by Neil Gaiman, I was curious but frustrated that I couldn't find the titles in our local stores. Online at Amazon.com, a single Gaiman hardbound would cost me up to a thousand pesos. Plus shipping. But then at Ebay, I found a delightful Gaiman e-book collection of nine titles. The price: Only 40 pesos, which I surrendered happily.

The thing is that a book's value can be fundamentally in the information and entertainment that its text provides, not in its format. What may stir up contradicting sentiments is nostalgia, a sort of rustic attachment to paper and its centuries of use. And I gotta admit that on cold rainy days, curling up in bed with a paperback novel sure beats facing a computer screen. Hardbounds also make way for great-looking collections on bookshelves.

But with the daring advancement of technology, are we soon going to see a day beyond the aesthetics and tradition of good ol' paper books, paper photo albums, paper journals and paper letters? And instead have everything in electronic words? Maybe. It has its practical side. Funny how of all things to be rendered obsolete, paper just might be the next.

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