In support of my segment this morning Canada AM's Your Say Question asked "Will ebook readers make books obsolete?" As I write this the results are a landslide with 92% in the "No" category. This kind of feedback is always invaluable for me, there is no live audience and so I can't hear anyone laugh or gasp or cheer. I get far too many e-mails than I can ever possibly respond to, but I read them all and am always keen on the ones where people tell me their own views and experiences. Today's poll wasn't written by me, I had nothing to do with it and don't even know who did or I'd thank them, but it's the kind of question I get asked a lot and I thought I'd share what goes through my mind when I think about it. 

While my spirit is with those who voted no, my educated answer is most certainly a yes. Poll questions are designed to be short and to the point. My take on ours is that the intent is to ask if paper books will one day fall out of popularity the way that film cameras, vinyl records, and typewriters have. They're all still around, old technology never truly disappears, but they no longer hold the dominant role in our culture that they once had.

The concept of the book is going to be about as eternal as you can get with these issues, there will always be "books", but the question is if they will still be printed on paper. In my office I'm still surrounded by bookshelf units. One unit is filled with books on film theory, another with science and nature, another still on literature and popular fiction. Hidden within my home still are storage units filled with more reference books, collections of prose, technology magazines, art and photography collections and containers packed with comic books. My office, however, is paperless. No printer or fax, I write on a computer, take notes on my iPhone, and publish everything on the web. It's been that way for nearly a decade now and I don't see myself ever going back. 

If there's one constant in technology it's that once you cross a threshold in innovation, it's very difficult to go back. Already we do the majority of our research online, few people consult the old paper yellow pages, for example. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, manuals, it can be argued that this class of books has already gone obsolete. It's far quicker and more up-to-date to use digital versions. 

Textbooks will be quick to make the change. They too are faster to use digitally, but once connected online they become dynamic and make it easier for them to be updated by publishers and expert communities. Right now there's a major conflict underway in the United States over the controlling interest of the Texas Book Depository who, because they purchase the majority of paper textbooks, have an unusual influence over their content on a national level. Replace all those books with digital textbooks and the issue would change dramatically, each state could more easily implement its own revisions.

It's easy to maintain an attachment to something if you've grown up with it. Most of today's students use the web for their schoolwork and soon many of them will be studying from digital textbooks. Paper books will have a smaller footprint in the lives of the young and they will have less motivation to hold onto that form factor. As much as technology can change with great speed, scale, and through a dramatic drop in expense, generational change remains one of the most powerful. 

Changes in display technologies and controls will do the rest of the work. The question isn't if today's eBook Readers will replace books, they're crude and primitive, but if tomorrow's version of that technology. In just over a decade we've gone from tube televisions and keyboards to LCDs and touchscreens. In ten years that will change again. Imagine a screen so thin and flexible that you can fold it up and tuck it under your arm like a newspaper. That's what our poll question is really referencing. 

Ultimately it will be about unlocking the world's knowledge, of the advantages that happen when you make every book a connected entity. Just as forensic DNA testing allowed law enforcement to go back and see all of their old case files in a new revelatory light, digitizing books will give new access to the intent of brilliant minds that have been overlooked and under-appreciated. The sciences are already undergoing this revolution as new digital search technologies are allowing research to be done using old data refined to offer new information and the result is breakthroughs and innovations. 

Books, old and new, will become more powerful and have a stronger role, not a weaker one. They just won't be printed on paper as often.