But he came up with printing instead, and opened the doors of entertainment and knowledge sharing to people. Today, 5 centuries later, we are migrating from hard copied books to interactive media, which includes books as well as audio, video, image and your own social graph. As a medium of transferring knowledge books are leaving the throne to Apps that are filing our lives more and more everyday.
What we are currently referring to as e-books (PDF documents text/ images) are not the digitised successors of the books that Gutenberg introduced, not fully. When the book as a medium introduced, it made use of the latest technologies available to it, paper, ink & stones. It provided access to the information that is available to print that is text (written or drawn). In opposition to the Pdf, applications are developed keeping in mind the software providing an interface to the machine, as well as text, images, videos, audio. Yes, the PDF files we are using in our daily lives, are books and they are digitised, but their responsibility of textual entertainment has changed hands.
Irregardless of the taste of opening a new book, an old book or even falling a sleep with them, the apps as we know them today will be the successors of the printed media, and I believe this will take the experience further as the adaptation of the technology spreads and advances.