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  1. “She said she believed that digital and physical content delivery formats would co-exist in the next generation of readers but that books did hold a place that digital data could not fill, at least for now. “As human beings we surround ourselves with things that help define who we are and books are one of those things — not just the narrative or story that is easily reproduced on the Kindle,” she said. “It is those dog-eared pages, coffee-stained covers or where you signed your name in the front when you were 4 years old. That memory is attributed to a physical object. Books are really part of what makes us human.””

    www.nytimes.com
    meljohnso

  2. “Ms Agoglia said that because children today spent so much time with digital devices, they viewed “screen time” and “book time” as different. “In book time they hold it in their hands, feel the pages and feel the heft of it,” she said. “Flipping back and forth in a book is much different experience than on a Kindle.” She clarified this as an observation, not a judgment: “You do not want to feel like a Luddite or trying to stop the flow of technology.””

    www.nytimes.com
    meljohnso

  3. “One can only encourage a reader like this to learn not to attach self esteem to the mere finishing of a book, if only because the more bad books you finish, the fewer good ones you’ll have time to start.”

    www.nybooks.com
    baetsie

  4. “There's a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they'd be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren't going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it's not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.”

    www.roughtype.com
    meljohnso

  5. “Here's the thing: you don't have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It's not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats! Crazy, right? To have choice. Neither is better or worse — for you, for the economy, for the sake of "responsible self-government." We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.”

    www.npr.org
    meljohnso

  6. “But as is often the case with digitization, the boon carries a bane. The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They'll be able to edit textbooks that don't fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today. Movable text makes a lousy preservative.”

    online.wsj.com
    meljohnso

  7. “And here is a question for a digital-era debate: is anything lost by taking a picture book and converting it to an e-book? Junko Yokota, a professor and director of the Center for Teaching Through Children’s Books at National Louis University in Chicago, thinks the answer is yes, because the shape and size of the book are often part of the reading experience. Wider pages might be used to convey broad landscapes, or a taller format might be chosen for stories about skyscrapers.”

    www.nytimes.com
    meljohnso

  8. “Once there were private libraries; then there were public libraries; now there is the ghost library, where poltergeistic fellow readers may not only be reading the same book as you at any moment but actually underlining the page of the book you are reading seconds before you get to it. They may be next door; they may be in Kamchatka; they may be anywhere, so long as they have Kindle and wifi.”

    www.lrb.co.uk
    meljohnso

  9. “Students are familiar with library textbooks that come pre-annotated with the marginalia of their predecessors, sometimes with abusive notes scrawled on notes, in a prefiguration of flame wars between anonymous website posters (it isn’t a coincidence that since the internet became ubiquitous, toilet graffiti have almost disappeared). But with Kindle the book is no longer a passive surface. It constantly checks in with all the other versions of itself and adjusts its surface according to the impressions the metareader has left on it.”

    www.lrb.co.uk
    meljohnso

  10. “The printed book, as Seth Godin wrote recently, is a fetish of sorts, like an expensive watch: something we buy because we like to look at it, but something that is no longer really functional or necessary. In the end, that’s likely to be a good thing, not a bad one.”

    gigaom.com
    meljohnso