Disappearing Ink: What will happen to all the books?
On a cool Thursday evening in January, several women gather around folding tables in a Central Phoenix warehouse to sort thousands of books, pausing only to pull out a greeting card used as a bookmark or to show off a rare find. This ritual takes all year — and every year, the work of putting together what's billed as one of the largest used-book sales in the country is the same. Only the titles change.
The volunteers quickly pull worn copies of Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses, Relationships for Dummies and anything by Maurice Sendak out of grocery bags, stick them with color-coded price tags and place them neatly into a maze of tall shelves filled with salvaged produce boxes labeled by genre and topic.
A few weeks later those books and about a half-million others took their places inside Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the Arizona State Fairgrounds for the 57th Annual VNSA Used Book Sale.
By the time you read this, book fans will have lined up around the block in the dark with big empty bags, waiting hours for the gates to open. Volunteers will have hustled between rows of tables, and, by the end of the two-day sale, the VNSA — which used to stand for Visiting Nurse Service Auxiliary but now means Volunteer Nonprofit Service Association — will have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to benefit local charities.
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2013-03-07/news/disappearing-ink-book-recycling-stripping-pulp/
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The random walk down a Bookstore aisle...the thrill of discovery that leads to a bit of new knowledge.
It's just not the same with an e-book although the convenience and ability for those with eye disabilities to be able to enjoy reading once again is a wonderful thing. And, it's good that those who couldn't catch a big publishers eye, now have a chance for their works to be read.
I do worry about the children who will be in danger of being corralled into what's available online and not the "random discovery," though.
But, it's possible both print books and e-books will co-exist after this initial thrill with e-readers becomes just another tool we use and maybe those legacy books (if they haven't been turned to pulp) will have another generation of discovery. They may become "something new" once again when the novelty of the e-books reaches a plateau.
At least print books don't have to be "re-charged" and that's an advantage. 
