Music stores deserved to go out business for that crap alone. I actually went to a music store a couple of weeks ago. It might’ve been the first time in about five years. I really enjoyed it, but it was hard not to notice that a ton of the merchandise was discounted.
Buy many VHS tapes lately? Cassettes? 8-tracks? Microsfiche? While paper books can’t be beat for library systems, power consumption, and the ability to be read in the tub, the writing’s on the wall (heh). For the kind of person that looks forward to and buys first edition, hardcover, new york times best sellers, the future will be ebook readers.
The problem with these debates is that it’s gotta be one way or the other, they’ll take over, but eventually, or they took over 100%, yesterday.
The reality is: paper publishing, in any major form, is dying. Anyone who doesn’t see that is fooling themselves. That doesn’t mean the death of the coffee table book.
The problem with this mentality when related to books as that they don’t have a format. Books have been books for hundreds of years. So they are much more entrenched than CDs or VHSs or DVDs ever were.
I agree with you, and that’s what irritates me. People talk about print books going away tomorrow and our children having no idea what a book is. That’s foolish and ridiculous. Print books will disappear, but much slower than CDs or even DVDs as an eBook isn’t that much of an improvement over a print book.
the exasperated toddler with the magazine, which refused to be swiped like an ipad, was remarkable though. even if it wasn’t indicative of the passing of paper.
just today a kid asked me why there is a need to write your address in a letter. i had to explain how correspondence via snail mail works.
Ha, the first time I took the SAT I painstakingly wrote the pledge in cursive and signed it, which took about 5 minutes to write 2 sentences. After that, I realized that legibility didn’t really matter, and scribbled something in about 30 seconds and signed it.
And maybe it’s just the title, but most of the stuff in this thread are things no one needs any more. It’d be interesting to see predictions of things that are relevant to current technology, but by the time our kids need them (to become self-sufficient in 10ish years) they’ll be obsolete.
After giving this some thought, Books DO have varying formats…ever read one in Latin? 
I’m not taking a side, but this is simply a bad argument.
First, a book is just as much of a format as a VHS tape. It’s paper bound into a specific form using a specific range of technologies. It was preceded by scrolls and, before that, clay tablets and, ultimately, people painting on walls. The book was invented, if not in living memory, than at least well within recorded history. There is nothing magical or sacred about the concept of the page,or the idea of binding, or the distinction between hardback and paperback. It’s just another technology.
Second, horses were even more entrenched than books were until, one day, within living memory for some people, they weren’t. Humans have been riding on horses for thousands of years longer than humans have been writing books. In fact, I’m pretty sure humans have been riding horses for thousands of years longer than they’ve been writing period. Thus, ol’ Dobbin’s job on the farm pulling the plow is secure for ever more, no?
I do too, (now that I’m separated) but I’m talking about a check with an amount of, say, $17,496.45. What do i spell out? What do I hyphenate? Where does the comma go? All I could remember was you put “and 45/100” for the cents then draw a line. (Not that there was room for one.)
Oddly enough, recently my landlord came around saying some tenants were expressing an interest in paying via electronic payment and was taking a little survey trying to find out how many people would be interested in something like that, and how much they’d be willing to pay for the convenience. For whatever reason I don’t pay anything electronically (set in my ways, I guess) so I told her I’d rather keep paying by check. So in some places apparently the pay rent electronically is becoming an option.
Switching gears regarding all the tv/tin foil type rememberings - anyone else have to whack their big ole console TV on the side on occasions to get the picture to line up right/quit rolling/fix the color a la the Fonz? If you whacked a TV today it would go flying across the room.
Loading paper into a dot-matrix printer with the sprockets on the roller.
I actually still have to do that at work. :mad: (Most of the equipment is nearly as old as - or older - than I am.)
On that note, knowing how to fiddle with the vertical or horizontal hold knobs on the TV. Growing up, we also used a little freestanding gadget (set up on top of the set at our house) that would rotate the TV antenna so that we could pick up stations in another city.
Using a landline phone in an office (pressing nine and one and all that jazz).
Cursive.
Alphabetical order - if you need a dictionary or an address or phone number, you look it up online.
Longhand. I’m tired of my students writing “IDK” on their papers.
Reading the things we’ve read. I thumbed through books I read in high school and middle school and there’s no way my students could read those. With the trend of replacing ‘classic’ high school lit with modern YA lit, I’m guessing thumbing your way through To Kill a Mockingbird will no longer be an educational rite of passage in the future.
Map reading.
Analog clocks. Yes, they are everywhere, but my students are still pulling out their cell phones to see what time it is.
Cooking. Everyone eats ‘prefabbed’ food.
And on that note…sewing. No one sews anymore. 
Balancing a checkbook.
I’m also wondering what will become of Social Security numbers. I feel like I’ve had to replace my card too many times already…it seems like in the future, the actual security of these numbers would be increased. Or maybe not.
Paper or machine ballot voting. Maybe we’ll all vote online in the future. Or not, since Google can’t check our IDs yet.
Oh! Figuring out how to access pot easily. Kids in the future will just get it from their parents’ stash. No need to smoke a bowl during your lunch break- just get some organic and gluten free pot brownies from Mom.
I also think food labels will be easier to read. Or I hope so. They really, really need an update. (And who the hell eats 2,000 calories a day?!)
I also think kids won’t need to figure out 10,000 cords and USB plugs for our computer gadgets. And maybe the keyboard or mouse will slowly fade into oblivion.
What about all the things we do now to navigate airports? I wonder if it will become more streamlined or carry-ons will be banned altogether. :o
Oh, and complicated taxes and long lines at H&R block. Everyone will do them online.
More challenging was neatly ripping off the sides with the holes and turning it into nice 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper.
I was quite skilled with a double cassette deck and could do decent mixes of songs.
Oh I remember when making someone a mix tape was the highest form of flattery!
However then will they ever be able to pass the “recite the alphabet backwards” drunk driver test? (Though, even sober I couldn’t do that!)
Landline phones in general, maybe.
I was about to get sarcastic on you (utterly unimaginable, I know) but this is actually a fairly good point. I doubt it will go that far, but the trend is there to some extent.
I don’t think so this time. It depends too much on what linguists call ‘register’, which is what separates formal and informal communication. Formal communication will always depend on longhand (modified by the fact longhand evolves like everything else (Where are the scribal abbreviations of yesteryear?)).
Another good point. Books go in and out of fashion; classics become prominent and then become obscure (and, presumably, no longer classic) on arbitrary schedules. Who today knows the Vicar of Bray? Who knows Chevy Chase (not that one!)? Boethius may be known to some extent, but who remembers A-R. LeSage? Indeed they are ex-classics.
If either of these were going to go away, they’d be gone by now. Especially cooking. We’ve had ready-made food for… well, if you define it broadly you might get back as far as the first caveman who bought someone else’s bread, but such a conclusion would be inane and deserving of scorn. Modern ‘TV dinners’ have existed since right around the end of the Second World War, and canning predates that by well over a century.
Using checks, more like. They’re already rare in parts of Europe, I think.
This will be something to watch.
Yeah, like how everyone in America has ready access to oxycontin and morphine now. Exactly like that.
I haven’t seen anything that can replace the keyboard.