With free eBooks online from Project Gutenberg, are libraries still important?
It is not that I think libraries are not important, I would like to think that they will change as much due to eBooks as they did via The Gutenberg Press; i.e., there will be more eBooks in periods of 50 years after eBooks showed up than paper books, just as when Gutenberg books arrived, there were more paper books published in the next 50 years than all the manuscripts of previous history. In addition, with the advent of RAMsticks, thumbdrives, etc. and terabyte hard drives for under $400, I think “Personal Computers” are rapidly evolving into “Personal Libraries.” Personally, I think that libraries containing music, movies, etc, as they have for decades now, is no different from containing eBooks. After all, the discs are the same, only the bits are different. I think that the library should preserve whatever the current media used, and that this obviously has changed throughout history I am quite certain the same kinds of conversations took place when it was the change from stone ta
