Of course, this kind of reading is very different than the kind experienced when you spend a week with a lengthy text purposely composed to function on numerous levels at once and to treat certain questions with great depth.

To paraphrase something the late David Foster Wallace said years ago, the more the world becomes fragmented, the more it needs good writers who can help us form narratives.

I used to be one of those people horrified that George W. Bush had not read a single continuous book. However, in recent years, spending more time with people who are neither in the book industry nor academics, I realize that George W. Bush is more emblematic of how Americans read (or don’t read) than serious readers. There are so many other ways in which the storytelling need in us is satisfied: movies, tv, video games with elaborate story structures, and yes, the internet. Whereas movies, tv, and video games have all existed before, better technology and better services means that all these storytelling outlets are now available constantly.

More than a switch to format, I fear that an increasingly larger percentage of Americans will stop reading discretely contained texts (books) and be satisfied with reading only for information.

In using the word “fear” in my previous paragraph, I privilege the act of reading as a superior way of satisfying that part of me that needs a story. The reason why I think reading is superior is because it necessitates both time and interpretation. Its very lack of immediacy means that the self must work to interpret the text, and it is exactly that lack of immediacy which makes it an endangered activity in a world where immediacy is a very attractive part of more technologically advanced storytelling.

I get my serendipity fix looking at women not books.

Or think of it this way: an e-book is simply one extra book on your shelf. But it’s a magic book that connects to a theoretical everything. You’ve got your three hundred books in the room with you and you’ve got your ten million books in that little sliver of plastic on the coffee table.

It’s a slow revolution until you buy one. But then watch.

The mission creep point is a good one. Beyond a certain segment of the population that really loves technology or needs an e-reader for professional reasons, I’m not sure how excited people are to be reading e-books. But if you could give that gadget a few more apps that people perceive as useful (e.g. text-to-speech, which people seem to really be liking), then, yeah, I think the market will broaden.

Further, I’m still at a loss, really, to think why I’d bother to read an e-book on a dedicated reader and not on a multitasking machine that gives me a reading experience which is only “bad” when compared to an eReader if I want to read in situations that I rarely want to read in (say in bright sunlight or in the bath!)

But that doesn’t matter. A small market is there, and growing, and they will make some eReaders a profitable proposition. But, alongside that, there are enough nay-sayers – and publishing is cheap – to mean that the codex has a bright future. As Levi says, if this revolution was going to happen it would have happened. Books are not CDs.

You’re both right to say that e-books seem to be affecting certain areas within book publishing (business and travel) but not really doing much to e.g. fiction. But fiction buying is a very small part of profit-driven publishing (literary fiction a yet still smaller part of that small tranche). And I think that fiction’s niche status is what is actually preventing mass e-book take up: there actually isn’t a mass to take it up!

Apple’s iPad is interesting for magazine publishers – the B&W Kindle doesn’t reflect magazine’s content very well. And the iPad (for all its faults) has set its stall out as the big challenge to the Kindle. The next Kindle will be colour; the next gen iPad will be Flash compatible and able to mulitask. All good. But note the “mission creep” here – eReaders know, in their hearts, that they are rubbish computers. Books, happily, never have to suffer that particular existential angst!

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with self-publishing. I still have the feeling that the culture is at a place where self-publishing isn’t “real,” and even people who buy their own PR will do it in hopes of getting picked up by a publisher. Also I wonder about the future of PR in a self-publishing world. I get enough emails from independent PR firms to know that some of them are really awful and are just filling in blanks, and some of them are staffed by really smart people who know how to sell a book. So will be interesting to see what trends emerge in terms of what kind of self-published author ends up with what kind of firm.

However, if people want to collate files and create their own books (such as the cookbook example where I could imagine myself taking multiple recipes from various cookbooks and putting it together as “My Favorite Recipes”) it’s possible that the Espresso machine would be more useful if available at the local drugstore like a copier or a fax service.

Any house, large or small, that has not secured electronic rights is facing a difficult road ahead with multiple negotiations. I take back what I wrote (oh so recently) about authors not being willing to take on their own marketing and publicity by self-publishing their books. This past week saw two announcements by authors who are trying out the self-publishing route. If this does turn to be a larger trend, there will be more robust publicity/marketing/sales services provided to such authors who would reap the entirety of their royalty payments, provided they are willing to pay an upfront service fee. I imagine that it is possible for such service “publishers” to take on the legal service model where the author would be given a bill that accounts for billable hours, phone calls, print services, etc. I don’t think it’s only royalties that authors are seeking but also the possibility of keeping all their books available to the readership. I assume that authors and agents are now actively seeking to change contract models and my feeling is that publishers should respond by proactively finding out what their authors want and providing an attractive package.

Point 1 is totally accurate. This has already killed some great indies.

Isn’t 2 complicated by the fact that a number of large houses don’t know if they’ve bought the electronic rights or not (e.g. Random House declaring pre-emptively that they own rights that aren’t explicitly stated in contracts)?