According to this article in the Daily Mail, a newly-discovered bendy substance called graphene that weighs next to nothing could be used in the not-too-distant future to make 'mobile phones that you roll up and put behind your ear and bendy electronic newspapers that can be folded into tiny squares'


So, feasibly, we won’t need either bulky printed books or electronic ereaders as whole collections like the Britannica Encyclopaedia could be printed on sheets of graphene, folded up and slipped in your pocket. Just imagine, from this:


To this: 



As small as a disc but you don't have to insert it into a computer, you can simply unfold it and read it.


 Does this add to the current fear that books – and newspapers and magazines – will disappear forever?  

I don't think so. With new technical discoveries happening all the time the electronic world is developing in leaps and bounds but whatever the media, there will always be writers needed for it and I expect we’ll learn to rise to the challenge and adapt to the new media sources.

The written word will never disappear, although the form it appears in may change, people will always want to read to be informed or entertained. And someone has to write that material, which is where we writers come in. Our craft will endure even if the way we present it and the public reads it changes.  It might takes us a little time to adapt to writing for these new devices but we’ll get there in the end and wonder what the panic is all about.  Just like writers have always done.


As Edward Bulwer -Lytton said ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.  Anyone running a course on how to write for bendy books and newspapers?



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