Have you ever read the book Fahrenheit 451? It is about a futuristic world, where books and critical thought are totally outlawed. In fact, a fireman in the book actually means “book burner.” People who are caught owning or reading books in the novel are put in a mental hospital while they books are burnt.

I thought of the novel as one thought lead to another while thinking about what would be more ecofriendly – a Book or an eReader (or iPad).

Technology has always landscaped not only our lives, but the environment around us. As soon as we figure out how to solve one problem, our solution creates another problem, and so on and so forth.

This is exactly what the eReaders do to us. eReaders increase the ease of how we read books, and how many of them we read. However is this necessarily a good thing? Are we looking at a real life Fahrenheit 451 in the sense of Books soon no longer being made the traditional way by using paper?

Paper mills all over the country are closing down due to the ever increasing popularity of the Internet. Just think about it – how often do you read off of the Internet and how often do you read out of a hard cover book?

Instant Gratification

Less and less percentage of the population reads Books like they use to. That being said, the percentage of the population and the amount that they read is actually probably rising on a day to day basis because of the Internet. Never before has information in print form been this readily available. Our news, our entertainment, our homework, our business information, and many other things, are all made readily available within a few clicks.

Books are considered too long and too much work to get through these days. The idea of speeding more than a couple of hours away from your computer to take time to read sound almost ridiculous to a lot of people.

Have you read a newspaper recently? Many newspapers are taking a big hit and for good reason. Not only do newspapers carry a ton of information that is irrelevant to you, but they are extremely annoying to have to flip through. They are big a gaudy, and you spend a lot of time just folding them back and forth to read an article. It is a lot easier for people to just print a page off of the Internet and read it that way.

The ease of use will always conquer something that is harder to use and less relevant. The TV replaced the radio, and the Internet replaced the TV. It is human nature to be instantly gratified – hopefully that insatiability will not lead to the death of books – who knows what type of trickle-down effect that will have on our ecosystem.

This article was written by Laura Zanskey. Laura helps to run a website that gives Hair Reviews at www.YouReviewElectronics.com. Fahrenheit 451 was one of her favorite books, and was ready as an english class project.

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