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Oh, it would be entirely possible to teach your children how to read and write, books or not. It won't happen though. The emphasis is going to be on survival, the ones who survive are going to be the ones who can run the fastest, not the ones who take time to read to their children.

There'll be some holdouts sure, but by generation 1.5 reading will be pretty much lost.

You know what's more useful than books to people trying to survive with no electricity? Trees.

bypassing the armageddon/gbaji tl;dr. . .

I always have a few books on the go; mostly paper, but enjoy the convenience of being able to read an e-book on the iPad or iPhone in downtime at work 9if I arrive early for a meeting).

I read about a book a day when I'm on vacation, so I can now take a bunch of e-Books with me without a ten ton suitcase.

I still disagree. Carrying a book on plants and a notebook aren't going to weigh you down all that much.

You'll be torching that book on the first cold night, and that notebook will be toast the first time it rains.

Swimming the Atlantic would require a support ship for rest periods and food. With no electricity the ship wouldn't be able to start. Sorry, you'll have to kill someone local instead.

Sure. And I'm not assuming people are running around with books in their backpacks or anything either. But reading and writing will survive sufficiently enough that once the initial death spiral stops and the survivors have settled into a sustainable lifestyle, the books which survive can be read for the information needed to rebuild. My entire point was that this is only possible if there are sufficient amounts of information left on paper books so that enough survives. Obviously, if all our information is in electronic form, this is impossible. Having to reinvent every single technological discovery will make the recovery process take a hell of a lot longer.


Of course, some would argue that it would be better to do it that way...

I can see it now: whole libraries full of technical manuals for things that don't work any more, programming languages that don't work anymore, and Twilight collections.

I don't think patent law would be an issue. And I was thinking more simply. A chemistry textbook, or metallurgical manual would be massively helpful for a society attempting to rebuild. Books on physics, and some engineering books would also be incredibly useful. Similarly, books on plants, farming, and basic tool design would help. I'm not necessarily talking about getting factories to run again. I'm talking about figuring out how to build a plow out of ore without taking a thousand years to do it. Do you know how long it took man to figure out how to build forges hot enough to make steel the first time? You can't just build a campfire and melt down stuff lying around.

A lot of information that will be lost in the initial panic and death can be rapidly regained if there are books lying about with the information written on their pages. One fully stocked small town library has sufficient information in it to jumpstart a recovery from the stone age to early industrial pretty quickly. Heck. A typical bookstore "how to" section would be a treasure trove. But as we go away from brick and mortal bookstores, and away from public libraries, and turn to getting our information from the internet, we reduce the number of those things over time. And if we eliminate them entirely we put ourselves into a silly potential situation.

See what Ash accomplished with just the shit in the trunk of his Oldsmobile?

Precisely! Those survivors will need mechanical hands and that's the only chance they've got!

GOD DAMMIT!!

Expect the price to fall even further. We early adapters always over-pay; it's just the way the market bounces.

I look at it optimistically: my replacement device will be much cheaper than the original.