There certainly is something sick about the book industry, but it seems closely related to the sickness affecting every industry that, under pressure from a corporate owner, dumps product standards and long-range planning in favor of ‘predictable’ sales and short-term profits.

As for books themselves, the changes in book technology are cataclysmic. Yet it seems to me that rather than dying, “the book” is growing — taking on a second form and shape, the ebook.

stainedglassbutterflywings:

I hear a lot of hate towards my poor little innocent Kindle. I hear a lot of valid, strong arguments against owning an ereader. But I love it, and thus here are my counter arguments: (the arguments against are bolded)

1.) I like to smell a book and feel myself flip the pages

I love that…

An excellent essay on reading digitally and otherwise by author, editor, and educator Kathryn Pope - worth reading in any format.

In LA, I read books from the library, bought used books on Amazon. I read books on my Palm Pilot. Later, I read on cell phones and laptops, desktops, iPods, and Kindles. I listened to audiobooks on CDs and MP3 players. I listened to a chunk of Middlesex while walking the span of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. I listened toMiddlemarch while walking on a bicycle path, heading west but never reaching the ocean. I read Audre Lorde from a Kindle on a Metro one Sunday afternoon, when a police officer stopped the bus and looked for fruit on the floor. I brought stacks of printed theory into coffee shops where I sipped chai tea until it finally went out of style. On my desktop, I read a memorable essay from William Gass on the use of present tense, where I also read Woolf and a peculiar book on the historical glamour of the invalid. On the Kindle, I read memoirs about goats and family, novels about yogurt and old men chasing windmills. I’ve been a reader all my life, and I’m not going to stop now—especially not when there are more ways to get books than there were five years or five minutes ago.

zwolinski:

This is important. Think about it.

(Source: bookoisseur)