Still dying but not dead.

Advanced book binding 101 was always the joke, when talking about athletes taking easy classes to get credit points to pass. I don't know what they are taking now that the death of books continues its global tour. Since last year, when we first talked about e books published overtaking traditional books published, the emphasis for online has increased to the extent that when searching for the death of books, you now end up with over 12 million matches. That's millions of articles and insights on the end of paper published books as we know them, along with bemoaning the rise of the online devil, killing an established part of our lives.

Everyone has read the rudimentary story about the e-shift and how it is affecting the entire publishing industry and all the sectors that service that sector. Book seller to the world Amazon, has long since jumped the shark tank and now sell more e-books than papyrus models and without making the joke passé, Kindle has made kindling of its paper competition. Jeff Bezos is not the devil, just a successful entrepreneur who has disrupted a legacy industry and found ways to make more books available online in more than one iteration.

If we are reading more, regardless of the form it takes, surely that's a good thing. The idea of a book just in paper will become a nostalgic memory of dog eared pages, occasional paper cuts and libraries daunting in their scale of collection. Print will remain and the faithful will hunt out limited printings but when your favourite author goes online and stays online, the choice becomes more obvious. Books have been around my entire life but history shows us otherwise and paper has only been prevalent since the mid 1500's.

It will be interesting to see if Bezos will be enshrined like Gutenberg, who changed the way stories were passed on from animal skins to the printing press. For aside form creating chaos within the publishing industry, Amazon and a raft of others, has created the opportunity for anyone to tell their story and be published online. No longer is a book the domain of the serious author with his leather elbow patches on display, waiting for Hollywood to take out an option on his story.

Today we all have the opportunity to write, to tell stories, to inform, to critique and to express opinions and insights, no matter how small the reading circle may be. It's not all Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winning literature but just about all of it finds an audience, even if that audience is only a mother or a close friend. The lament regarding the death of books needs to be replaced with the joy of possibility and opportunity, for anyone to tell their stories. Best sellers will come to mean something different in years to come with no capital expense required to publish, the audience size could be global, local or even family.

After all, whose mother wouldn't want to see their kids in print and having one person read and appreciate your writing is sometimes enough to make it feel like a best seller. Books aren't dead, they are alive and thriving and coming to a tablet, a reader or even a phone near you.