Playing Poker with those Print Things

There will, I trust, be more like this in the coming months. About time too:

The media's response to this device will, I am sure, be negative. We will hear a lot, over the next few weeks, about the soullessness of reading on screen compared to turning pages. If I promised you a pound for every time you are told by a columnist during the month of October that "you can't read a Kindle in the bath", I would be skint by Christmas.

In the newspapers, on TV arts shows (are there still any TV arts shows?), on Radio 4, around us at social occasions, we will see and hear mournful disquisitions on the beauty of the old-fashioned papery book and what a tragedy it would be if people stopped buying them.

But you know what? Nobody buys books anyway. Nobody. If you have a friend who has written a book, ask how many copies it sold. The answer will probably be 12. Or none.

Victoria Coren goes realist in The Observer.

The Three Rs

Reading, Writing & Arithmetic?


Typing and Reposting?

What will happen to us when we stop reading books not because we don't want to, but because we can't?

That day seems to be approaching for me. But I don't want to go down without a fight, so even though I knew I was doomed, I checked out that doorstop of a novel (Roberto Bolano's "2666," a mighty 912 pages) and took it home.

I made it through no more than 10 pages before I had to put it down and skim a magazine, but I was glad I tried. It seemed like a good book. So good, in fact, that I later consumed it the modern way:

I read the plot summary on Wikipedia.

From "Technology and books: Is the novel too much for our technology-addled brains?" in the cash-strapped Chicago Trib.