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text is that they are used in public places, with a million distrac-
tions. It is socially acceptable to interrupt someone who is looking
at a PDA screen. By contrast, the TV room — a whole room for TV!
— is a shrine where none may speak until the commercial airs.
The problem, then, isn’t that screens aren’t sharp enough
to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren’t screeny
enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.
Electronic books are a wonderful adjunct to print books. It’s
great to have a couple hundred novels in your pocket when the
plane doesn’t take off or the line is too long at the post office.
It’s cool to be able to search the text of a novel to find a beloved
passage. It’s excellent to use a novel socially, sending it to your
friends, pasting it into your sig file.
But the numbers tell their own story — people who read off of
screens all day long buy lots of print books and read them primar-
ily on paper. There are some who prefer an all-electronic existence
(I’d like to be able to get rid of the objects after my first reading,
but keep the ebooks around for reference), but they’re in a tiny
minority.
There’s a generation of web-writers who produce “pleasure
reading” on the Web. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some
are enraging. Most dwell in Sturgeon’s 90th percentile and below.
They’re not writing novels. If they were, they wouldn’t be Web-
writers.
Mostly, we can read just enough of a free ebook to decide
whether to buy it in hardcopy — but not enough to substitute the
ebook for the hardcopy. Like practically everything in market-
ing and promotion, the trick is to find the form of the work that
serves as enticement, not replacement.
Sorry, got to go — 8 more emails.
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