Kindles are just books and books are already mostly fairly compact and inexpensive long-form entertainment and information.

They're convenient but if they went away tomorrow, my life wouldn't really change in any material way. That's not really the case with smartphones much less the internet more broadly.

That was exactly my point.

Funny, I had "The collected stories of Frank Herbert" as my next read on my tablet. Here's a juicy quote from like the third screen of the first story:

"The bedside newstape offered a long selection of stories [...]. He punched code letters for eight items, flipped the machine to audio and listened to the news while dressing."

Anything qualitative there? Or all of it quantitative?

Story is "Operation Syndrome", first published in 1954.

Hey, where are our glowglobes and chairdogs btw?

Hah, can't resist posting even if this story is old and dead by now.

Went further in Herbert's shorts volume and I just ran into a scene where people are preparing to leave Earth on a colony ship to seed some distant world...

... and they still have human operator assisted phone calls.

That has to be the most dystopian-sci-fi-turning-into-reality-fast thing I've read in a while.

I'd take smartphones vanishing rather than books any day.

My point was Kindles vanishing, not books vanishing. Kindles are in no way a prerequisite for reading books.

Thanks for clarifying, I see what you mean now.

I have found ebooks useful. Especially when I was traveling by air more. But certainly not essential for reading.

You may want to make your original post more clear, because i agree that at a quick glance it says you wouldn't miss books.

I didn't believe you meant that of course, but we've already seen it can happen.

Well, there was Ender's Game, it came in '85. Usenet did exist at that point, though. Don't know if the author had encountered it.

The Shockwave Rider was also remarkable prescient.