This is a question for anyone who has an answer or even an opinion on this subject...

...and that subject is books.

Paper old-fashioned books vs. E-books, that is.



My question is not so much which are better? because I know it's all an individual thing. For me, real paper books are the best. That's because they are the only kind I have around me. I do not have E-gadgets for reading books and I have no desire to have them.

That said, however, I realize E-books and E-reading of said books is becoming the wave of the present and future. More and more young people are using them. More and more older folks are, as well. But it's the kiddies that I'm specifically thinking about here.

The crux of my question is all about economics. I realize that it seems that "everyone" has an E-reader but that's not really true, now, is it? I don't. Lots of people I know don't either. So should we assume that all children of school ages have E-readers? Or that they ALL can afford to have them?

I don't know specifics about the costs of these gadgets, but I know they can't be free. Right?

You have to put up a good chunk of change to buy one in the first place, right?

Does every child in this country have that chunk of change to put up?

Also, once you HAVE the gadget in your hot little hands, don't you have to pay for each and every book or item you download to it?

Does every child in this country have enough money at his or her disposal (via their parents) to afford to be downloading all the various books, articles, newspapers, or whatever will be "required reading" to get them from kindergarten through 12th grade? That's 13 years of buying things constantly.

Do the parents of every single school-aged child in this country have the resources to be spending this kind of money?

I ask these questions as one who is not familiar with the economics of owning one of these gadgets. So I ask it kind of rhetorically but also because I really don't know any of the details of an answer.

The reason I ask is because I just saw a short interview on TV about the future of books in the schools, and the conclusion was that within a "few years," school-aged children won't have paper books any longer and will all be using the E-gadgets. They said that within a decade, children will wonder what those paper things are on our bookshelves that we so lovingly have saved for years and years.

Also, who will pay for all this upgrading?

Will it be a fee that parents will have to fork over at the start of every year in order that their children will have the most up-to-date E-gadgets from which to learn? And how much? As it is now, and I could be wrong, but I think that in a lot of towns across this country, parents are now having to fork over big fees to the schools if they wish their children to participate in any school-sponsored sports.

So now are they going to be responsible for paying for all the reading materials their children will need, as well as the implements on which to read them?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As you all may know, we don't have human children -- just dog-children. Our dogs are pretty low maintenance compared to a human child, or two or three, and they don't require all these modern 21st century E-gadgets either.

So if anyone knows the answers or just wants to discuss this subject, I'm open to hearing from you.

It just seems to me that since we still have "poverty" (a bad word apparently to the pols who have taken to calling the poor "low income" families) in this country, there are surely going to be a whole swath of kiddies who won't be able to keep up or who will be left out of the loop somehow. I hope this is not the plan.

[I once heard or read somewhere that if the Republicans ruled the world, they would keep all the richest people and discard the rest of us as waste. This was back in the Bush-years, and I was all too eager to believe that about him and his ilk. I believe it about the current Republican candidate for President, as well, and I pray that enough of us can see past the ever-changing speeches and into the realities of what he would do to our world here.]

I didn't mean to get political, but I guess all life is political when you get right down to it.

Cheers,

Bex-the-Wonderer

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