I’m not sure what this has to do with e-marketing but it’s something that I’d like to point out – a realization that hit me suddenly and made me sad. It also made me pause in the moment and just realize with wonder how much things have changed. How so much of the tangible, which was once an integral part of our lives, is on the path of becoming archaic as everything turns virtual in our digital age.

Ever since I was little, it had been my dream to have a library as magnificent and as packed with books as the Beast’s library in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. If you need a refresher, this is what my dream looked like:

Now, I actually have a fear that I will never have that. Rarely I see someone with a novel in their hand, flipping the pages as the story unfolds. I look around and I see iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Kobos, and an array of other e-readers and I know that that is the direction our world is going in. Any book is at the tip of our fingers, reachable with a few taps on the screen, and available at the fraction of the cost of a hard copy. And as quickly as tech companies push out the latest gadget, my dream has rapidly dissolved and morphed into a harsh realization that looks something like this:

It’s amazing how far we’ve come in such a short time. I marvel at how technology has seeped into pretty much every aspect of our life and therefore absolutely changed the landscape of living, relationships, business, and marketing. It’s like how electricity entered our lives and made candles nothing more than decorations we see once a year on birthday cakes. It’s mind blowing being able to watch this evolution take place over the course of one’s life and witnessing how all things marketing can be seen in a totally different light.