[ActiveCaptain]

My intuition says books will always have a place on a boat, as batteries die and computers fry. When I go offshore I'll have a sextant, as the stars won't go away but GPS might. Paper charts? Always. Computers? Not every time.

I agree in many ways, August, but the reality is that there are few people like us with paper charts out any longer. Most boats I walk onto these days not only don't have paper charts out, the don't own them.

I'm sure this exact thing happened in other areas as technology marched ahead too. I'm sure there were people who warned about the removal of the crank used to start early automobiles. I'll bet people argued about how much would be lost as the telegraph with Morse code replaced the Pony Express. But my professional world is in these next-technology products and I'll promote it as vigorously as the guy who came up with the first self-tailing winch pushed his.

Perhaps electronic guides won't replace paper ones but if I had to choose my customer base right now, I'd choose the one's using GPS, MacBooks, and iPhones and leave the sextant-carrying group to the paper guidebook publishers.