I think Danuta hits on a few very good points: one is that it is very hard to say that ereaders will explode along the same lines as the ipod, and secondly that the ebook format offers too much to not catch on.

It’s not just a matter of age that leaves her unsure of the technology’s future. I’m a student in his early 20′s, and I don’t know if a reading device will be able to embody a “mass-market coolness” in the way that the ipod has. Why? Because music is simply different to reading. I find it hard to picture an advertising campaign based on an ereader with the same impact of Apple’s dancing silhouettes in the ipod advert. Literature is something that it’s fans tend to enjoy due to its exclusivity. Of course I could be proved wrong…

My contemporaries and I are so used to the convenience of researching online that I’m sure a site selling electronic academic texts would make a killing. I’m sick of walking up to the library only to find that it’s closed due to a Bank Holiday, or that I haven’t got time to queue for the photocopier cos it’s nearly 7 pm. Both of these problems: access and distribution would not effect an e-book.

Jane Holland

*

Why buy them, to preserve them? Better
to let cyber-space have them, let them be words
on screen, seen and unseen, corruptible.
That page will fade, data disappear, no safer there
than between hard covers,
yet never so beautiful nor dangerous, something real
to hand on, like a name or a sword.

Say that under our fingers, our eyes
or here on the tongue, a book of light is rising:
the word that we made to be heard – dignified
godhead, salt-washed,
bound bone and blood in it,
went to the stake for it, then lost or discarded –
has been hidden from fire, riddled
with worms, pressed and spotted
by browned wild flowers,
over-written by notes scribbled
in margins, recipes
laid down on blank versos and these ghosts
on the flyleaf, the dates and names
of the faithful – when bought, when handed on,
where kept, by whom (though rarely why,
the hidden purposes of readers
blown like dust from gilt-edged spines).

Or rather say, look, this is what we achieved
in our age. This is a book.
Open it to the first page and read.

FROM: Books at Auction, “BOUDICCA & CO” (Salt Publishing, 2006)

When, in 1997, I wrote to Louis Baum, then editor of The Bookseller, suggesting a website review column, I was 68.

I’m now almost 78 and still leap out of bed at 5.45 a.m. to spend a couple of hours online before breakfast.

Dangerous to generalise!

Anne
http://bookwormonthenet.blogspot.com