Writing

And I'm not talking about the content (which can be considered as such)

Thanks to reading the blog of Joe Konrath, I have to agree with him that this concept that physical books are superior to electronic books is, to put it politely, nonsense. When you are "lost in the story", unless you're the man with two brains, you're not going to be stopping every now and then just to admire the physical form of the book, smell it, lick it, or whatever. No, you're going to be lost in the story. That's the point of books, to transport the reader into other worlds, or as in the case of nonfiction, to inform them of this world.

Of course, people will continue to argue that the physical book is superior anyway. Perhaps they'd be satisfied with an idea for an electronic book a friend told me about years ago, created by MIT's Media Lab. As I recall, it was a physical book in form, but the pages were electronic. They were still of a substance like paper, could be turned from page to page and so forth (probably not dog-eared, for those thinking of that!) There's no technological reason why this can't be done today, and with the same exact technology used in the Kindle. That is, e-Ink. (There are probably plenty of marketing reasons why it hasn't been done, though...)

Personally, I'm glad I don't have to fight any more with a paper book, trying to keep it open while I eat or type if I'm using something in it for reference. Sure, I could break the spine, bend it backwards like we've all seen plenty of people doing when reading the latest consumable "best-seller." Can't do that with hardbacks and I've never liked doing that anyway, mostly because years later, pages start to fall out. I don't have any of those problems with my Kindle, and, I can make the print bigger if I don't want to use my reading glasses