The Loss of Books, Newspapers & Magazines

In this day, digital media is on the rise and will soon lead to the end of print media indefinitely. Facebook and many other social media sites often send people their news thus making print media of all sorts obsolete. Both articles agree with the fact that advancements in technology will only keep leading to the decline of use of print media such as books, newspapers and magazines. Libraries “have been around too long” and are “no longer relevant”, according to Horrible Histories author Terry Deary, an apparently lone literary voice to believe that libraries have “had their day”. Deary goes on to explain how the concept of libraries have never been beneficial to authors and their financial gains. According to Deary, libraries give nothing back, whereas bookshops are selling the book, and the author and the publisher get paid, which is as it should be. What other entertainment do we expect to get for free?” he asked. I agree with Deary that libraries are unnecessary and are in a sense costly for the taxpayers that fund them, but do not use them often.  In the End of Books article, we learn of hypertext and how such a technology brings about the desertion of print media. According to the article, “Hypertext” is not a system but a generic term, coined a quarter of a century ago by a computer populist named Ted Nelson to describe the writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made possible by the computer. Hypertext provides multiple paths between text segments, now often called “lexias” in a borrowing from the pre-hypertextual but prescient Roland Barthes. With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as opposed to print’s fixed unidirectional page-turning) hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author. I agree with both the articles that print media is on the steady decline and will eventually be nonexistent.