Call me an incurable optimist, but I see a future for books. As I was reading chapter 6 and its references to Amazon and e-books, the recent announcement of Amazon’s first physical book store kept coming to mind-a surprising turn around for a company that has been seen as the villain of bookstores. Looking into articles on it, there are a number of opinions on the impact of this. Some writers say it is a good thing, others claim it’s a bad thing. There were also a number of articles that described a resurgence in books and bookstores. One underlying theme in these articles was the question: what does this mean for the future of bookstores and books?
Nicolas Carr writes of the book surviving earlier challenges, yet also states “we have cast our lot with the juggler,” a foreboding prediction about the end of books and the manner in which we read them.
But could there be another outcome?
Radio, film and vinyl were all types of media slated by commentators to fade into obscurity. Yet, today there are locations in Portland where people can still have camera film developed and recently a company began producing vinyl records.
Does this mean books will survive the Internet? Books changed our culture of reading and how we communicate, such as the use of spaces between words. Users of the Internet continue to use the same words and sentence structure that evolved with the development of the book. Is that not survival?
Strategically Communicating 
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