The world is constantly changing, evolving into something new. Music has transformed from vinyl to tape and from tape to CD. Just when it appeared as though CD was the preferred format there was the introduction of digital media and the fact that people could download songs in MP3 format. Now pretty much everyone you meet has an iPod and carries around their whole music collection in a box no bigger than a cassette tape.
Technology creates and then erases the latest invention before it has hardly had time to get itself established. But with that being said, there is one area that has managed to survive the technological onslaught and that is reference books.
Although there are a number of alternatives to using reference books, it appears that the masses still prefer at times to sit down with a good book and flick through the pages to obtain the information they need or require. So why hasn't technology caught up with reference books?
Well one simple reason that sometimes the information in these reference books is extremely specific. The internet is obviously the resource that would take the place of reference books but to do that it requires that someone inputs all the data from the pages of every reference book in the world onto the internet. Now I'm not saying that is impossible because it isn't, but it would certainly take some time to complete the task. For a start who is going to pay to host all of this information on the internet.
Another reason for the survival of reference books is as I mentioned earlier sometimes people just like to have a book in front of them that they can hold and turn the pages of. You don't get the same experience when on the internet, you have to instead stare at a backlit screen which provides an element of eye strain and stress to the user. Another simple fact is that rather obviously you need to be connected to the internet to access the content. In the current day and age the internet is fairly reliable, but if the internet was to fall over, obviously it would be advantage to the reference books as you can pick them up as and when you need to obtain the information.
Obviously one day there may be a better form of obtaining data through the internet but at the moment the book still rules the day and technology hasn't managed to catch up with it.
Author Resource:-
Dominic Donaldson is technology expert with many years of experience following the latest trends. Find out more about reference books at http://gale.cengage.co.uk/
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