Here’s a great article from the Times Online about eBooks. Considering I gave a presentation on the Sony Reader and the Kindle earlier this week (video available on the NLC blog), I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one who still thinks that they have their place, but won’t ever replace printed books. Here’s a sample:
None of this, however, spells doom to the physical book. A reader who falls in love with a book, even if first read in electronic form, will still want to own it. Books do more than furnish a room: they are our intellectual companions.
Some books are worth sacrificing a tree to make; others are not, and that is the distinction that the electronic book offers. Ruskin once observed that literature is “divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time”. The books of all time will remain on paper, but those of the hour will increasingly be digital: the airport novel, the reference book, the celebrity memoir. A personal library will no longer be the repository of unread paperbacks, but a genuine index to individuality, as it was in the days when books were rare and precious.
