The current issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism focuses on the future of writing and reading, offering up a spate of interesting writers examining various threads of that theme. Of particular note is The American Prospect associate editor Ezra Klein’s look at the Kindle, Amazon’s new digital book reader. Books may be in decline, he surmises, but people are still reading all the time – we’re glued to our computer screens. So surely the Kindle is onto something?

So I consulted my conscience, which is as much gadget-head as bookworm, and quickly came to a decision: I would simultaneously support reading and the introduction of expensive new electronic devices by buying a Kindle and proudly toting it around town for a month. That would give me time to determine whether this really was the future of reading, or whether the nation remained threatened by grave and unnamed consequences.

But after both admiring and criticizing the Kindle, Klein comes to the conclusion that if the reading revolution will be digitized, it needs to move beyond the typical conventions of the print medium.

At the end of the day, the true advances won’t come in the Kindle, but in the content.

[…]

This may, ultimately, prove to be Amazon’s truly crucial role—not driving the future of reading so much as the future of writing. E-reading technology will push forward even without Amazon’s involvement. The Kindle will soon face stiff competition from a bevy of able competitors. […] But if the Kindle’s successor or competitors are to succeed, it will be because Amazon used its status as the world’s largest online bookseller to force authors to think seriously about creating content that works better than the book, that goes where the book cannot, that’s interactive and cooperative and open in ways that printed text will never be.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Despite all the hand-wringing by those who claim that literary culture is trapped in a downward spiral, overwhelmed by movies and video games and a 24/7 fixation on Britney Spears’ fender benders, book sales and library visits tell a different story. Last month, the Assn. of American Publishers reported that 2007 book sales were up 3.2% over 2006. Since 2002, the book business has seen a growth rate of 2.5% a year. And at the University of Chicago Library, the number of students slouching through the door topped the million mark last year for the first time.

Besides computers, students can behold marvels that don’t have to be plugged in, such as a newly acquired gem from the 14th century, “Le Roman de la Rose” (”The Romance of the Rose”), a beautifully illuminated manuscript created about 1365, based on the original by Guillaume de Lorris.

“Our library is very heavily used,” said director Judith Nadler. “The digital and the print-based will continue to coexist. We don’t want the electronic instead of the book. We want the electronic and the book.”

This is very heartening, but at the same time, what they call “handwringing,” we call “editorial content.”

Penguin is now offering free downloads of the first chapter of many of its new releases, including titles such as Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans and Janet Evanovich’s Plum Lovin’.

Colin Brush, senior copywriter at Penguin, writes on the Penguin blog:

These days I will on no account buy a book unless I’ve read some of the writing within. No really. I don’t give a damn what the blurb writers – a pack of miserable, tricksy curs (I know, I live inside the head of one) – have written. Or what the FT thinks about it. Even what Martin Amis has penned on the matter. Sure, all those words – if they’re good – together with a decent cover have a great chance of getting the book off the 3-for-2 table and into my hands. But I want to get a taste of what’s within if I’m going to commit.

This is why you’ll find me at lunchtimes in bookshops, cracking open the covers and reading the first few pages of any old rubbish. If I’m going to devote some time to a book then I want to hear the author’s voice, I want an idea of what sort of story it is right from the start. Surprise me, thrill me, have me begging for more.

Which brings me to Penguin Tasters … New Tasters will be added as each title is published. Currently, we have 53 up there for you already.

This comes in the wake of just under 15,000 readers freeloading Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children, and is perhaps precipitated by the recent revelation that people tend to pay attention when things are free.

While the Canadian publishing industry is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward e-books, the U.K. industry seems to be chomping at the bit to get on board. According to The Bookseller, two of the U.K.’s biggest book retailers – Waterstone’s and Borders – are preparing to get behind e-books in a very big way, prompting publishers to step up the production of titles.

Waterstone’s is in talks with publishers about the supply of e-books, and is understood to be planning a July launch for its programme. Borders is gearing up to sell e-books from its transactional website, which launches in April. Commercial director David Kohn said: “We hope to have an [e-book] offer in place by the end of 2008.” Gardners is also ramping up its e-book delivery service.

Agents are being inundated with requests from publishers to clear e-book rights at speed. Philippa Milnes-Smith of LAW, head of the Association of Authors’ Agents, expressed concerns that authors were being “rail-roaded”. She said: “We understand where publishers are coming from, but we’re concerned for authors that they get the right remuneration, and also that e-books are published to the same standard as printed books. Our overriding imperative is quality not speed.” Publishers are looking for blanket clearance of rights, she said. “We treat authors individually, not as a job lot.”

The industry’s burgeoning enthusiasm for e-books is especially notable in that the U.K. doesn’t even have the big e-reading devices yet – the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are currently available only in the U.S. Basically, U.K. booksellers are just getting ready for the splashy U.K. launches of those devices later this year.

Random House in the U.S. is offering a free download of Charles Bock’s much-hyped debut novel, Beautiful Children, but only until Friday.

In a statement released by Random House, Bock said, “I want people to read the book. If that means giving it away for free online, great.”

Mark one small victory for supporters of Creative Commons, the alternative licensing protocol that gives authors more freedom to dictate restrictions on their work. As reported on the Nebraska Library Commission blog, several CC titles are now registered in its catalogue – including PDF versions and several spiralbound editions. Apparently, processing the titles presented some problems for the library’s fastidious staff.

Not being a cataloger myself I can’t give a completely accurate accounting of what I put our cataloger through, but I owe her a lunch. Some of the questions raised by these items were just who the “publisher” was and what should be listed as the publisher’s “location.” Larger issues such as whether these were newly unique editions or just reprints of a previously released edition also needed to be addressed. Discussion ensued and decisions were made. Are the records perfect, I’ll leave that for others to judge.

The newly catalogued titles include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow; Trigger Happy by Stephen Poole; Shike by Robert J. Shea; My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel by Steven Brust; and The Future of Ideas, Code Version 2.0, and Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor who created the protocol.

(Thanks to Bookninja for the link.)

As the debate about whether to publish on the Internet continues to rage in publishing houses and ivory towers across North America, Oprah’s latest stunt is adding fuel to the fire.

Last week, author Suze Orman made her book Women and Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny available free on Oprah’s website for a period of 33 hours. More than 1.1 million copies were downloaded. Even so, the book remains a bestseller and ranks No. 6 on Amazon.com.

Now that the crisis over parity and pricing has eased somewhat – at least for the moment – we can again turn our attention to a more pressing issue in books: how can we get them for free?

The easiest way to get free books is to work in publishing (or at, say, a publishing industry magazine), but there are millions and millions of readers – or, at least, thousands and thousands – out there who are not so lucky, and who are thus still paying money for books. And so, for them, here is the latest in free book news:

• HarperCollins will post free books on the web (The New York Times)
• Tor to give away e-books (Slashdot)
• Not free, but close: Random House U.S. will sell books online, chapter by chapter (The Wall Street Journal)
• But don’t forget: free books are rarely free (CNN Money.com)

Defences of the old-skool paper-and-ink book against the nefarious Borg-like proponents of the e-book too often sound, for all their passion and sincerity, as if they should be read aloud by Wilfred Brimley, or even Andy Rooney . Call it a fatal folksiness. This piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, listing all the ways in which paperbacks have it over e-books, is not really any different, though it does point out an important advantage possessed paper books: their stick-aroundedness.

For those of us who read books (I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but it should be) there’s nothing quite like:

• Rediscovering an old friend of the dustier shelves and getting reacquainted (Catch-22);
• Lending a book to a friend because you think they will enjoy it (Darkly Dreaming Dexter);
• Getting it back;
• Giving copies of your favourite books (To Kill A Mockingbird, Lord Of The Flies, No Country For Old Men, anything by Chuck Palahniuk) to your children and hoping they’ll get as much joy out of them as you did. Then maybe, one day, they’ll take it down from their bookshelf, pass it on to their children and say, “My Dad gave me this.” It’s just as Kahlil Gibran wrote: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” And if, like Robin Hood, you can attach a little written note to your arrow, all the better.

Try doing that with an e-book.

Fair enough. Though it should be pointed out that the ability to be leant out and passed on is far less a boon for publishers of books than it is for readers. Just saying.

Reactions to Amazon’s new e-reader generally fall into two opposing camps: on the one hand, there are those who are shocked and appalled at the very notion, while others believe a wonderful new era has dawned. (We suppose a third camp could be made of people who don’t really care one way or the other.)

A cautious pro-Kindle article in the Los Angeles Times includes quotes from some publishing notables, including the New York Review of Books’s Jason Epstein and authors Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Franzen, who are heavily in the anti-Kindle camp. Franzen’s thoughts on the whole notion of e-reading, it must be said, make him look less like a defender of the simple virtues of the perfectbound, and more like a pretentious twit:

“People who care about literature care about substance and permanence […] The essence of electronics is mutability and transience. I can see travel guides and Michael Crichton novels translating into pixels easily enough. But the person who cares about Kafka wants Kafka unerasable.
Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.”

[…]

“The difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in a cathedral.”

There are a couple of points to be made here, while remaining Kindle-neutral: vows made in a shoe store mean just as much as those made in a cathedral (a point Matthew Yglesias makes in his blog at TheAtlantic.com); most people read Shakespeare in cheap, ratty, paperback student editions, not the Arden, and they are not any worse off for it; a lot of people listen to music on their iPods via files that are mutable and transient, but that doesn’t mean Beethoven and Bob Dylan and Kanye West and The Arcade Fire are themselves erasable. The portability of the medium does not necessarily have a retroactive impact on the creator of the content. If that were true, then this Quillblogger would be forced to apologize to the families of all the authors left behind on buses and streetcars or dropped in the bath and ruined.

Not that genuine, unpretentious criticisms of the Kindle itself are not being made. Even if one is to accept the near-blasphemous idea that words can be read on a screen as well as on paper, Amazon’s new device has some glaring shortcomings. The latest to be discovered is that, in some cases, the texts being offered for the reader are incomplete.

Here’s blogger Marc Rochkind on his own experience with the Kindle:

The device itself works fine. Yes, the screen could be more readable and it’s awkward to handle because the previous- and next-page buttons are much too big. (You can’t grab the device by its edges.)

I finished reading my first book on the Kindle yesterday (The Kite Runner), and the experience was fine. I really like the ability to preview any book by reading the first three chapters. Web access is clumsy because most web sites expect a much wider screen and clicking on links is roundabout and flakey, but it does work, it’s very fast, and it doesn’t depend on WiFi. Buying even best sellers for $10 or less is a great deal, as is the free web access.

But the problem is that the books are incomplete. I started the sample of my second book, Under the Banner of Heaven, and I noticed that the footnotes, marked with an asterisk in the text, were missing. (You’re supposed to be able to select them as hyperlinks, but they weren’t connected to anything.)

I checked another book I had in paper form, Einstein: His Life and Universe, and the only footnote that I could find in the sample seemed to be linked, although I couldn’t actually access it since it wasn’t part of the sample. Fair enough.

But The Path Between the Seas failed. A footnote was marked with an asterisk, but not linked.

I queried Amazon’s very responsive Customer Service, and they responded (on a Sunday!) with this: “Kindle Editions are electronic versions based on the original publication issued by the publishers. Occasionally, conversion of that content for reading on Kindle may require modification of content, layout, or format, including the omission of some images and tables and in this case footnotes.”

Well, I don’t want to read Kindle Editions, whatever they are. I want to read the books as written.

The latest news from the annals of text-message lit comes from Japan, where cell-phone novels – books composed on a cell phone’s cramped keyboard and consumed on its tiny screen – are producing bestsellers, emoticons and all.

The Sidney Morning Herald reports that the phenomenon, called keitai shousetsu, is racking up some impressive sales numbers:

Remarkably, half of Japan’s top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way – on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined “to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture”.

Even more surprising, those figures refer to the sale of conventional, paper-and-glue books, not the text-message installments that are sent out to subscribers prior to the book’s publication. Here’s one keitai shousetsu editor’s rationale for why the e-book subscription translates into a physical sale.

It might seem strange that young readers are going out and buying the book after they’ve already read the story on their mobile. Often it’s because they email suggestions and criticisms to the author on the novel website as the story is unfolding, so they feel like they’ve contributed to the final product, and they want a hardcopy keepsake of it.

Too bad participatory novel-writing is the way of the future, not the past: this Quillblogger would have liked to have had a crack at, say, The Brothers Karamazov – another bestseller at the moment in Japan. Cut that sucka’ down to size!

Bad news, folks: new technology like the Kindle will enable the greedy, unruly masses to bankrupt the publishing industry as we know it. Glum futurist and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington sounds the death knell on his blog:

Users may buy a book or two on Kindle, but many users will simply steal the content they want to read. Thanks to Amazon, that’s really easy to do on their slick new device.

Should users do this? No, and we do not encourage this. But will they? I think we all know the answer to that.

Good news, folks: the common decency of book readers, who understand that “[w]ider access to copyright materials and fair remuneration for rightsholders are not mutually exclusive,” will carry us over the shoals of the new digital age. Guardian blogger Penny Grubb keeps the faith:

The digital revolution is no different from any of the other new, unprecedented so-called threats to hit us. Everything’s new the first time it happens. Of course it’s faster, bigger, slicker, more efficient and encompasses the globe in a way we’ve never seen before. That’s the way the world works. It’s called progress. But not everything changes. Most people won’t knowingly break the law and will be happy to pay a fair price for what they use. All they need to know is what to pay for and how to do it. Of course, the how-to-do-it had better fit the falling-off-a-log model of 21st century convenience.

Despite its klunky design and prohibitive cost, the Kindle ebook reader is the beginning of the end of publishing as we know it, according to Guardian blogger and budding futurist Rob Woodard. Not only that, it “has the potential to so completely alter our notion of what a book is that in 10 or 20 years’ time the bound paper version might seem as quaint and limited as a roll of papyrus seems to us today.”

Clearly, such a change will have an effect on mainstream publishers. Woodard elaborates:

In an ebook world, printing goes out the window and readers essentially act as their own distributors. This leaves publishing companies with only their editorial and marketing wings. Freed from the crippling costs of book manufacture, storage, and distribution, it is easy to imagine a situation in which small publishers can compete with larger houses on the basis of the quality of their work, instead of the size of their cash reserves.

Or perhaps writers will simply avoid these gatekeepers no matter what their size and publish their own work, either as individuals or in publishing co-ops of their own making, thus ending publishing as we know it. Or maybe none of this will happen, because early in this book revolution, large companies will have grabbed control of the reading devices and databases so that everyone still has to play by the rules they set down.

Some Quillblog readers may find Woodard’s reasoning objectionably reductive – i.e., his depiction of publishers as greedy middlemen that authors and the reading public are only too eager to dispense with. Still, it is a nice thought, this brave new digital world; we’d like to have one of those publishing co-op thingies ourselves.

Of all the traditional complaints about e-books – that they are hard to read, can’t be read in the bathtub, don’t actually resemble books, etc. – there is one that has never before been addressed, perhaps because most people assumed it was a point in favour of e-books: the fact that they don’t smell. Specifically, that they don’t smell like old books.

As it turns out, for a whole lot of students – the most lucrative potential market for e-texts – the smell of a book matters. And the older the better.

This is the very failing to be remedied by online e-book provider Café Scribe. According to a press release on its web site, the company will soon be providing e-book users with scratch-and-sniff stickers that give off the odour of a musty, old tome.

Though the target market is students for now, we see these stickers being an in-demand item for ex-used bookstore owners and librarians who are having difficulty adjusting to civilian life. It would be like a nicotine patch for recovering bibliophiles.

BookNet Canada CEO Michael Tamblyn spoke at a Saturday morning seminar on “Digitization and the Future of Canadian Bookselling,” which focused on e-readers. In order to assess the viability of the medium, Tamblyn himself tried a 30-day no-paper diet in mid-April.

He found that while the software posed problems and the Sony Reader he used was initially hard to hold, he soon succumbed to the e-charms. He could carry about 80 books with him at once, the Reader wasn’t hard on the eyes because he could increase the font size, and the machine’s battery life was excellent. “There were lots of things I liked about the e-book experience … and all of the annoyances are solvable by engineering,” Tamblyn concluded, reminding the 40-odd attendees, “these are first-generation devices.”

But Tamblyn said he still sees a future for bookstores. He advised celebrating the books themselves, using the physical environment and face-to-face communications and recommendations offered in bookstores. “It’s about taking the role not of a stock-keeper, but a curator,” he said.

Tamblyn also sparked a minor controversy among the attendees when he suggested abandoning the practice of ordering books for individual customers. To that, one bookseller said he caters to a readership of women 35 and over who want to special-order because they don’t want to use the Internet; other members of the audience reacted with incredulity, saying that women ages 35 to 65 are the group most likely to shop online.

(On another note, someone else is apparently trying out the Sony Reader this weekend. Marketing research consultant Dan Aronchick passed his around in a seminar he conducted on Friday, and one of the attendees managed to walk off with it.)

At a Friday seminar, Kris Abel, CTV’s resident tech expert, looked at some of the electronic-reading platforms currently on the market and forthcoming. He pointed to:

• Manybooks.net, which offers e-books in almost any format for greater consumer ease; most formats are variations of XML or PDF, with the latter the most common so far.
• Mobipocket.com, an online store that offers free software to allow readers to transfer e-book text to their computers, cellphones, Palm, and Blackberry devices.
• The Iliad, which uses “electronic ink” technology to mimic the texture and feel of paper. However, the electronic ink technology means a high price (about $700) and makes the device unsuitable for other uses like watching movies.
• Amazon.com’s rumoured “Amazonkindle” reader, which was to have wireless capablility; Abel speculated that its release was delayed or scuttled by Apple’s announcement of the iPhone.
• The iPhone itself doesn’t have e-book capabilities yet, but Abel said that’s a likely development and labelled it as “the device to watch,” with a “deliciously high-resolution screen” and touch screens instead of a keyboard. The phone comes with four or eight gigabytes of memory.
• At the moment, the Sony Reader, sold for about $350, is a leader among the gadgets. Although it is not available in Canada yet, it is being sold at stores such as Borders in the U.S. as well as in Sony stores. It has a six-inch screen and supports Sony files but can also read PDF files.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates delivered a lengthy speech about the future of media and advertising last Tuesday at a conference in Seattle, and he spent a fair portion of it talking specifically about the future of print. Seattle-based technology blogger Todd Bishop has posted several excerpts from Gates’ speech, including this one:

Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. […] Somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.

Not that Gates would be biased toward technology or anything. A more convincing examination of the future of e-reading can be found on the Guardian’s website, where author and technophobe Andrew Marr writes about his month-long experience using the iRex Iliad, which has been touted as one of the first truly usable e-readers on the market.

(Thanks to Quillblog reader Jennifer Lambert for pointing out the Gates link.)

BookNet Canada, the agency that, among other things, tracks books sales across Canada (the data that Q&Q uses to assemble its bestseller lists), has started a blog. In the latest entry, BookNet president Michael Tamblyn makes an interesting point about the kinds of titles available for download to the Sony e-book Reader:

Have you ever rented a cottage or stayed in an inn or hostel where owners and past guests have left books on the shelves for your reading pleasure? It is usually a mixed bag of thrillers, mysteries, romance novels, maybe some history, sometimes some real wildcards and surprises. You don’t have a lot of choice, but you do get this strange snapshot of what people read when they’re on vacation.

Getting books for the Reader at the Sony Connect store had a similar feeling. As I browsed around looking for titles, I realized that I was seeing a composite picture of the consumers that publishers believe are reading digital books. At the moment, they appear to be a group of randomly selected airport travellers. Lots of thrillers, mysteries and romance novels. Some science-fiction. Plenty of business books and sports titles.

One book Tamblyn would like to have available in digital form while on vacation is Thomas Pynchon’s 1,000-page 2006 novel Against the Day. Unfortunately, it’s not available for download.

Quillblog would humbly like to suggest that part of the problem Tamblyn faces may be due to his definition of a “cottage read.” Remember: Thomas Pynchon in town, Stephen King in the country.

To mark its (final) Summer Fiction issue, Toronto Life is running a web-only roundtable discussion with three Toronto authors: Shyam Selvadurai, Sheila Heti, and Andrew Pyper.

The subject is “Toronto literature,” and a couple of themes emerge in the early parts of the discussion. One is that it’s hard to assign a general notion of place or style to a community as varied as Toronto’s. Another is the fear that if you do write about Toronto, readers elsewhere in Canada will resent you for it. Says Pyper: “there’s almost an apologetic reflex to set stories elsewhere so as to not upset fellow Canadians—’Oh, here we go, not Toronto again.’ I’m writing a novel right now that’s set in Toronto—and no one’s going to stop me, damn it—but I’m aware of that being a factor. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said, with an eye roll, ‘Oh, a Toronto novel,’ whereas I don’t think someone would have that same cynicism with regard to a Vancouver novel.”

Once the digressions kick in, though, things actually get more interesting. The three writers also discuss e-books, the mechanics of plot-driven fiction, and the merits and importance of books in relation to other art forms (and no, they don’t all necessarily agree that Books Are Best).

Related links:
Read the Toronto Life roundtable

With the extortion-esque prices of books these days, it always feels good to stick it to the Man and grab a good deal on a read. And what better deal than free?

Book lovers everywhere can enjoy “free access to 300,000 texts online” this summer, according to an article in the L.A. Times.

A third of a million e-books will be on offer for a month at the first World eBook Fair, courtesy of Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library. The downloading frenzy will begin at the fair’s website as of July 4, Project Gutenberg’s 35th anniversary.

Penny pinchers can revel in bypassing World eBook Library’s usual annual $8.95 fee, and those who cherish the oldies-but-goodies can go hogwild with Gutenberg’s selections, which are made up of “mostly [books] no longer protected by copyright, [and] include fiction, nonfiction and reference books and will be available for worldwide readers in about 100 languages.”

Related links:
Read the L.A. Times article here

It wasn’t long ago that futurists were predicting a brave new world of online retail outlets that would make the bricks-and-mortar shop almost obsolete. (These same futurists also predicted the “paperless office” and the dominance of the e-book.) Though there is no doubt that online booksales have diverted a sizeable portion of sales from the traditional retail book market, an article in The Guardian points out that used-book dealers have actually profited from the Internet. Richard Adams writes: “While shops selling the latest Harry Potter or Tom Clancy novel have had to grapple with competition from online upstarts offering deep discounts and convenient delivery, the fusty world of second-hand bookselling has increasingly embraced the net not just to compete, but also to expand its horizons.” The article looks at a number of online used-book success stories, big and small, including Canada’s Abebooks, considered to be the most successful of the bunch.

Related links:
Read The Guardian article

A new weekly column on Gizmodo.com, a blog dedicated to electronic gadgets, kicks off with a long look at the past, present, and future of e-books (remember them?). Columnist Sanford May makes some interesting points about the limitations and strengths of the paper-free book, including an analysis of why the RocketBook, one of the first “fully realized” e-book readers, never took off: “RocketBook came to market under similar circumstances as the first wave of digital music players: only hardcore geeks wanted one…. The display, based on the same technology used in laptops and PDAs, wasn’t much fun to look at for lengthy sessions, and the library was limited. It died early, hardly mourned.” May also looks at a new device from Sony called E Ink, the first e-book system to utilize electronic ink, and concludes that the best-case future for the e-book may be a peaceful co-existence with the printed page.

Related links:
Read Sanford May’s column on e-books