Books are not meant to be chopped up and consumed in pieces. You don't read one chapter of the new James Ellroy, and then flip to Margaret Atwood's latest and back again. Books to many are fixtures: permanent and tangible beyond the word themselves...
[Snip]
I've downloaded numerous free e-reader apps for my iPhone (and even bought a few books for them), but other than killing a little time on the subway I haven't read more than fifty pages in total. As a publishing obsessive, worried to death about the state of reading given the onslaught of entertainment that embraces exploitation and ignorance over any sort of wit or nuance, my grandest hope is that e-readers bring in that coveted demographic which currently seems to embrace the printed word only to the extent that they skim the captions beneath a photo of a bikini-clad Kim Kardashian.
[Snip]
Ebooks should look to expand the book buying market, not be used as an alternative for the print edition. Look at the ads for the iPod: they're fun, they're cool, they feature all sorts of (pastel-colored) people who are far funkier than anyone you or I know grooving to the licensed beat. Then consider the ads for the Kindle: the music is straight out of your local elevator. Hesitant readers aren't going to rush out to spent $299 to listen to the reading equivalent of John Tesh.
Note: When this item was first posted The Huffington Post incorrectly attributed the piece to Jessie Kunhardt, a Huffington Post's Books Intern. On Friday afternoon, the attribution was corrected and a new url generated. The old url also redirects to the new one.
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