The End of Books?

With the unprecedented success of the Amazon Kindle, and the newly announced Ipad, I find my self thinking about the future of reading altogether. These E-readers make it so easy to keep a huge library of books right at the tip of your fingers. For home use this could be great! No more monstrous bookshelves taking up space, and collecting dust. I myself am thinking about what books I can get rid of to minimize my space. Maybe this is the start of a post consumerism era, where we rid ourselves of all the junk we have been carrying around all of our lives. While on the home front I see changes in this regard, the most significant change I see is in Education. Instead of Students carrying around 25 pounds of textbooks everyday, who knows, maybe one day all they're going to need is an Ipad. This seems pretty cool at first glance, but what happens when that student thinks, hey, i might as well just start taking notes with my Ipad. It makes perfect logical sense. Why worry about pens, paper and pencils when, you can do everything with one device. Is the end of writing coming to a close as well? Probably not. We still will need to write notes, etc. around the house, and children will obviously need to learn the alphabet. But will it be on paper or on a tablet computer? The world is changing very quickly, and technology that would have been science fiction when I was a kid, are now everyday tools. It's scary that by the time my daughter is in high school, her friends might label me as a hippie for reading a real book.