1. Digital texts are equivalent to “box wine” or instant coffee: they might have the same content of alcohol or caffeine as a top-quality drink, but you lose so much of the flavor. No, we’re not all connoiseurs in wine, coffee or books (I can’t tell instant coffee from real), but to those of us who see a real difference between reading a book and reading a (misnamed) ebook, the difference is huge.

2. Separating the content from the form necessarily changes the experience, and therefore the book. Personally, I love the sensory experience that is ‘reading a book’: the feel of the book & its pages, the layout of the page, the smell of the book, the sound of turning pages, the comfort of a well-stocked bookshelf, etc. Reading digital files is tiresome & unimpressive. Books that were written to be books should be read as such. Books that were written to be digital files should remain so.

Other food for thought for your future blogs:

1. The dangers of turning our literary heritage into digital files owned & controlled by an increasingly small number of companies,

2. The destruction of bookstores, new & used, which have long remained one of the bastions of free speech and thought, to make way for a near monopoly of a few publishers, and a few e-reader manufacturers (who are also the digital file sellers.)

3. The destruction of bookstores as “middle man” and economic force. Billions of dollars funnel through these resellers, supporting the economy. Soon, all profit will be held by just a few online resellers and a few publishers.

4. The replacement of human booksellers with statistic-gathering programs. The programs will tend to encourage readers to buy the most popular books, meaning hard times for starting authors, authors with less financial backing, authors who don’t support the status quo, dead authors, and many more.

I just realized how late it is….oops! Well, it seems as though we are jumping into this digital reader format with both feet. I hope there’s something solid for us to land on.