In class this week, we did an exercise on defining the logos appeal in the analysis of an argument. I found a CNN article this evening on the replacement of the traditional paper book with the eBook. It continues to be a fascinating and divisive subject, so I thought it would be interesting to determine the argument’s effectiveness.
Nicolas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, frames the argument in terms of efficiency. He suggests that it would be impractical to provide books for nearly 500,000 people in parts of Africa. Then, he notes the advantage of eBooks to easily multiply 100 books into 100,000 versus having to print each of them separately. This is a very effective, pragmatic point. Having a preference for the experience of owning and reading a physical book is one thing, but that use case simply does not support the education of such large a population of people with limited time and financial resources.
Negroponte also measures the global reach of eBooks by its establishment as a standard form of reading material and educational tool. He turns assumptions about development on their heads, suggesting that developing countries are actually adopting the eBook at a faster rate than developed nations like the United States. He rationalizes this claim by comparing it with the assimilation of cell phones. This makes perfect sense, as it is usually much easier to teach people a skill or how to use a tool for the first time than to recondition them; as was the case with land-line to wireless phone usage in the US and other first world countries.
Technological innovation is our future. The eBook is outpacing the physical book just as the printed word did handwritten one. Now that’s not to say that books will be completely obsolete in the foreseeable future; but the article does make a strong case for the inevitability of the eBook taking its place.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/17/negroponte.ebooks/index.html?hpt=T2
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