Ebooks had to happen.
In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.
Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.
Books should cost less and they should be digital.
It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off.
E-books, which made their debut in the 1990s, cut costs even more for both consumer and producer, though as the Internet expanded, those roles became confused.
The future of reading is screens. Books are toast.
I hope that books don't go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.
E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.
The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.
There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.
I sometimes read books on my iPad.
Ultimately, I think that the growth and sustainability of the e-book movement depends on authors and end-users (readers).
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.
I would not be surprised to see interesting new forms of expression and literary genres develop as the e-book movement matures.
I saw the short stories people were doing on Kindle and really liked the idea of seeing something I'd written on that screen.
You can't love a library of e-books. You can't furnish a room with e-books.
'The Expats' would not exist without e-books.
