AT a time when everything is pivoting toward the virtualscape, thanks to the world’s encompassing embrace of the ever more inclusive smartphone, the venerable paper-and-ink book finds itself at a crossroads. For what use is a book in hand when you can virtually have the world at your fingertips via the virtualscape? As it turns out, in fact, a book has many things for the reader that online sources will never be able to provide.
Take, for instance, availability. A book is available to you every minute of the 24 hours of the day, no matter that it sits on your bookshelf most of the time. An eBook or a PDF, on the hand, could be unavailable if the site hosting it is experiencing an outage, if your device is suffering connectivity issues or if you simply forgot to charge your device.