So, I was working on cleaning up my place the other day, and I was noticing yet again that I really need more room for all of my books, when I suddenly realized that wasn't what I actually need. What we need is a book that works like a hard drive.
Imagine a new kind of printer for a moment. This printer doesn't just print out pages. You can also feed pages into it, which it will then make blank by pulling the "ink" off of them. Once it has blanked the pages, it will then print on them again using this same "ink". Obviously, this wouldn't be old fashioned ink - may not even be old fashioned paper either. High end versions of the printer would be able to create a re-usable binding of some sort for the pages. This way, instead of having shelves and shelves of books (which take up an awful lot of room in an apartment), you could just have say, 4 or 5 "books", with all of the rest of your collection as PDFs or something on your hard drive. Obviously, you would want a couple of different standard sizes of paper in it - paperback, textbook, magazine.
The reasons we need this should be obvious - how much material do we have that we need to read, and how much of the time we're going to be reading it do we really want to be staring at a computer screen? Paper is a much more comfortable medium for the human eye to read, as opposed to CRTs, Plasma, LCD, etc. But really, if we were printing out everything we need to read all the time, we'd be shreding forests even faster than we already are. Anybody who has a large book collection will also recognize that it would be a lot easier if they didn't have to find room for this massive collection somewhere in their house - or worse, apartment.
Somebody is going to make a million bucks off of this idea one of these days. Too bad it isn't going to be me...
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