江苏海事学院教务系统:请高手帮忙翻译一下，谢谢

Why the Micro Will Never Extinguish Ink
A current craze among computer pundits is to predict the demise of the printed word. Soon, they tell us, our daily papers will be beamed down by telephone line, satellite dish and optical fibre and we will browse at leisure on the screen of a home computer. No more inky fingers and wave good-bye to the paper-boy.
Letters will go the same way, as snail mail is replaced by its electronic counterpart. The postman joins the paper-boy in the dole queue.
Books and encyclopedias will get the treatment, too, we’re told. Away with the dusty tomes in gold-embossed binding. In future we’ll just type in the subject that interests us and, after a brief buzz from a computer version of he compact disc, a list of relevant entries appears on screen.
But how realistic is this dream of electronic information and correspondence? How soon will we begin to burn our libraries?
Rest assured, in all probability it will never happen. Such glowing predictions of an electronic future overlook several fundamental considerations about the virtues of ink and paper and about the way we compile, absorb and collect information.
Consider first the sheer practical problems of reading a newspaper on the screen of one of today’s micros. An average page of The Times has on it about 160 column inches of text, headings and advertising copy. If this was displayed in exact facsimile on a conventional computer terminal it would occupy about 27 screens…
There are other more subtle problems concerned with the creation and absorption of text on screen. Books, magazines and newspapers can be cross-referenced easily—it’s possible to turn quickly from one page to another and slip in scraps of paper/vanilla pods/pencils to mark each reference.
You can even have four books open on a table top simultaneously. Windowing on a computer partly reproduces this flip-through capability, but has one severe drawback: if you split the screen into two windows you only get half as much text in each…
But the biggest obstruction in the path of the techno-juggernaut is likely to be human nature. Computers are cold and logical and converge on information in an exact and predictable manner. Not so the human brain.
One of the great joys of reading reference books is the chance distraction thrown up by the strictly alphabetical organization of information. Look up “Australia—gross national product” and you have a 50/50 chance of stumbling over the mating habits of the Axolotl, just pages away.
Retrieving electronic information may be more efficient, but it eliminates these small diversions that make research so guiltily enjoyable. Finally, there’s the sheer pleasure of reading and writing in the conventional way.