Final thoughts: "Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age"

Final line there you are!!!!! I can't believe I'm finished
I only have grateful words for this Web 2.0 Learning program. It was a fascinating experience.
My work at the Library is helping patrons to use computers, specially the Internet, so this training has been so relevant to my daily tasks that I only can be grateful for it. I learned heaps, and realised how well behind I was and how much there's to explore ahead.

I loved the image and photo exercises. I really enjoyed playing with these creative tools and had fun like a child with new crayons.
Also I got fascinated with my exploration of the sites from the Web 2.0 awards. Gee! There are so many tools out there to discover!

One of the best thing of the program was it opened myself up to reflect about many issues I hadn't payed much attention before like How is technology changing us? Where are we heading up to? What are the pro and cons of having so many tech tools in front of us? and the most intriguing of all.... Where will the next generation of the web take libraries??

So, for my final thoughts I leave some ideas of the book I recently found "Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age" by Jeff Gomez.
His ideas may sound cruel or blasphemous to librarians or book lovers, but he gives facts hard to deny.

This book explores the fate of book in this digital era. He offers very radical and controversial opinions: like saying books are still on our shelves but not on our hearts anymore, they are destined to fade away not because of the Internet, e-books, mobile phones or ipods but for our lack of interest on them.
He says consumers are not ready for replacing books, they feel uncomfortable with digital books but it is a matter of time (...) the truth is, most of the people do their reading digitally and the Internet is currently the first source of information dissemination.
He makes a parallel between this time and Gutenberg times when the first books appeared, there was the same skepticism as today towards digital books, he says.
(...) While print is not yet dead, it is undoubtedly sickening. Newspaper readership has been in decline for years, magazines are also in trouble, and trade publishing (the selling of novels and non-fiction books to adults primarily for entertainment), has not seen any substantial growth for years. More and more people are turning away from traditional methods of reading, turning instead to their computers and the Internet for information and entertainment. Whether this comes in the form of getting news online, reading a blog, or contributing to a wiki, the general population is shifting away from print consumption, heading instead to increasingly digital lives.
(...)
................ Listen it for yourself: free podcasts of excerpts on his website or my bloglines)

Thank you Lynette and all the team behind this program!