Bill Gates says all reading will be online

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft has told a conference in his home town of Seattle that all reading will be online within five years. In his presentation the software guru believes the only barriers to total online reading are device size, cost and battery life.

"Somewhere in the next five-year period we'll hit the transition point," Gates told the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit for online advertisers. "Why is reading online better? It's up to date, you can navigate you can follow links."

Gates did not provide attendees with any clarity on how this transition will take place, whether eBook readers or MP3 devices would lead the change in consumer behaviour. "The only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, much do I have to spend to buy it?" Gates admitted that a high level of reading still takes place in print, but believes that will change, "As the device moves down in size and simplicity…we'll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today."

Gates said the mass media will undergo the most radical change, although he didn't cite any particular change. "The media itself will be quite quite different. The number of people who actually buy or subscribe to the newspaper and read it has started an inexorable decline. The internet is like a lot of things – the only sure winners are the consumers themselves."