BootsnAll Travel Community

The website Napster has been in the news recently for its role in pirating music. The whole new attitude to file sharing and 'open-source' ( Linux etc ) is the way for the the future. How will this affect outfits like Lonely Planet who still try to sell their info in the form of books?

In my humble opinion...
I'm sure the thought of this disgusts many of you, but once we're all carrying out Palm Pilots and other portable computing devices, guide books will become needless weight. Instead, your Palm or cell phone or whatever will be able to download all the latest info on whichever destination you plan to visit. No doubt you'll also be able to ask last-minute questions to helpful travel experts like those here in BootsnAll. All of this will be free. File sharing is what the Internet is all about. It is impossible to regulate file sharing without shutting the whole damn Internet down.

I know what you're thinking...and I detest cell phone carrying yuppies as much as you do. But just think about all the trees we'll be able to save once books are a thing of the past.

Paper books will never go away. I hate reading things on a CRT screen. There's nothing quite like flipping open a good "old-fashioned" paper book and just idling flipping through to read whatever catches your eye.

More books and periodicals are sold now than ever before - if anything, the Internet and electronic media are encouraging reading on paper.

Its March 14th and Napster is still going! I like the way some people have come up with a way of encrypting the names of the songs so that that can't be blocked. I also like the fact that the music industry cannot unscramble this encryption........its illegal! ha.ha

I agree that its much more pleasurable reading from a newspaper than a monitor, but its wasteful to cut down trees and ship wood pulp around just for a daily paper. Solution : invent a thin plastic foldable screen, with a memory attachment. Make the daily news downloadable and sell subscriptions. Then you could load your daily paper, take it with you, roll it up and delete it.

If only I was smart enough to develop this