I often write about reading in this blog; it is a fairly natural - even logical - progression or collocation for anyone thinking about information, books or libraries. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr wonders if - like the Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico [who, after Gutenberg's printing press] worried that the easy availability ...

… and what does Ray Bradbury mean when he says that There is no future for e-books because they are not books at BookExpo America When, or indeed, why is a book not a book? If we take digitized version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, or even of his Fahrenheit 451, and present it on-screen, surely we have an electronic or digitized version ...

In a 2006 keynote paper, Michael Jon Jenson, wrote that - having previously forecast the end of paper books, he had discovered that he was wrong: My fundamental error was in thinking that technology was the driver, rather than the human culture using the new technologies. So are we humans really incapable of learning new tricks, of moving on, of ...

I was reading a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review by Ezra Klein, The Future of Reading, which explores his experiences with a Kindle, and - more generally - with reading on something that is not paper-based. Klein quotes William Powers’s brilliant essay “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal,” (pdf) which considers the evolution of paper ...

Whenever the debate turns to e-book readers – and especially, of late, the Kindle – people seem to divide sharply for or against, with few concessions. By way of clarification, as a library/information consultant I am largely ‘for’ e-book readers – I can see plenty of advantages and uses, but can also see some faults – or improvements that should ...

Recently, I noted that I thought some of the social e-books sites (such as The Institute for the Future of the Book's 'Gamer Theory' e-book site) are more about the writing process than the reading of a published book. Now I have discovered (thanks to an if:book post, unbound reader) that another organisation has been working on an e-book model ...

The Kathleen Fitzpatrick article I referred to in my last posting, talks about ''the tyranny of the book'' (Stallybrass) and ''bookness'' - her word for what I have called 'book-like'. She notes: Stallybrass suggested, almost as an aside, that the book is a production, finally, of the binder. This is a point I’d like to dwell on a bit, as it ...

Following on from my last posting on the definition of e-books, and the appropriateness of my term ‘book-like’, I was struck by a sentence in an article by Kathleen Fitzpatrick: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts. She wrote, [Peter] Stallybrass notes the irony in digital textuality’s regression from the kinds of manipulation that ...

In all the years that they have been around, very little research has been done into the use and efficacy of e-books. I find this not a little strange given the amount of titles available, the aggregators which make them available, and the fact that virtually every university library has some e-books available. I suppose that publishers can ...