With society today using the Internet and electronic devices many, especially kids, don't use libraries or books anymore.
All their research and reading is done online or on electronic readers.
This part of the movie is becoming reality.
Future generations will ask "what are books?".
Well we still have the word 'books' in 'ebooks' so at least they will know a book is something I read on my tablet. Yeah pretty sad in a way.
shareIt seems sad to us, but future generations won't mind. I don't have nostalgic feelings for typewriters, dial telephones, phone cards or other technologies that went obsolete during my early life or just before. Further, I may enjoy travelling in a horse cart for the kick of it, but I have no desire to regularly use one. I love paperback books, but the first generation to grow up in a world of 'ebooks only' will not understand why they're that fun at all.
sharebooks are still books if read on electronic readers. the content is what matters, not the form in which you read it.
shareExactly, I think the OP missed the point of the movie and thought it was about paper being harmful 0_o
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. -Isaac Asimov
Quite so, the advent of electronic books and sites like project guttenberg etc have actually made fahrenheit 451 an impossiblity - it is impossible to imagine now that books could ever be eliminated because they're not just on paper, they're out there floating about in that extraordinary world of cyberspace.
shareThe problem there Louise is access! After a catastrophe that destroys the global power grid or in 1,000 years people will still be able to read a book they found lying in an abandoned house. You can't say that about ebooks.
If a thousand libraries burned to the ground you could always find another, but if the Internet stopped working after a solar flare hit us it would just become a million servers in a million locations that all had to be accessed manually and individually to see what they contained and people would spend days rigging up batteries to computers just to discover that the part of the internet they have stumbled across is full of nothing but cat videos or Jamie Oliver recipes.
I like how we are backing up so many things including rare documents and old computer software so that they don't die when the last of their paper or cassette tapes are lost but all our technology is based on electricity, and though we may take it for granted electricity is only a guarantee during times of peace and no disaster. There is no internet in any apocalypse movie.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. -Isaac Asimov
Through time, books and most things will be (and have been) gone. Even languages and knowledge. Languages are rapidly disappearing at a rate of one every 14 days. As many as half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to be extinct by the end of this century.
We don't know how the Pyramids, the Angkor Wat, Manchu-Pichu, the Stonehenge, and countless other wonders around the world, were built. It's been proven that humans have been existed on this planet for over 200,000 years. But, the oldest text that we have nowadays is the undecipherable 5,000 years old Dispilio tablet.
As of today, our knowledge of human civilizations can go back only 8,000 years ago. Ancient texts that had written onto stones, stonewalls, papyrus, bamboos, cloths, silk, papers... are scarce and many undecipherable. It's not a far fetched idea that thousand(s) years from now, all of books and knowledge as we know of today will be disappeared as with our civilizations. (Heck, we don't even completely understand or grasp the whole ideas and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangleo, Teslar, etc., and they're but about 500 years ago or much less.)
Who to say that our forms of preserving knowledge on books and digital will be functional forever? The Egyptians and their peers thought that writing on the walls would be. Who to say that a nuclear war will not break out in the near future? It almost did in 1962 (just a bit more than fity years ago) with the Cuban Missile Crisis. And remember, all nations with nuclear weapons have enough nuclear bombs and warheads to destroy this planet over and over and over...