Ebooks had to happen.
We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.
I can imagine a future in which real books will exist but in a more limited, particular way.
Books should cost less and they should be digital.
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.
...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?
I was interested in the questions that come up when the Internet gives you access not just to JSTOR libraries and to digital information, but also to things that are live and dynamic and organic in some way.
The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book.
I hope that books don't go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.
To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.
I think the definition of a book is changing.
Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
Since our online libraries are so extensive, we think we can make all the right decisions about our personal health and well-being by pushing buttons. It's not intuitive anymore. That's the internet. Before the net, we would have gone to the community or our families to see what we should do. We often feel more isolated on our own little islands because of it.
I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do.
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.
The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.
You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple.
The small visual inconvenience of e-books is made up for with find and search functions, and the fungibility of digital text.
Books and technology are braided together and always have been.
