Reading in the Digital Age
Ten years ago, almost to the day, a university press published a novel I had written in fits and starts over the previous four years. The editor of the press marveled about the advent of publishing-on-demand and how he submitted an electronic copy to a printer and it stayed that way until physical copies were needed. Always a late adopter of new technology, that sounded like science fiction to me. What I didn’t know then was that paper books of any kind were already in many ways a quaint throwback. The very first time I heard about electronic books was in the mid 1990s. A professor at a small regional university told me how soon all books would be in electronic format, like on a computer screen. He said he appreciated how converting text to digital format would open new horizons, especially in making scholarly works more widely available than our usual system of interlibrary loan, but he also said after a pause, frown, and a bit of a moan, “But I just like the way books feel.” He ...