Ebooks had to happen.
E-books, which made their debut in the 1990s, cut costs even more for both consumer and producer, though as the Internet expanded, those roles became confused.
It's very difficult to read a book on your computer.
The advent of Kindle, the iPad, and other portable reading devices has so far simply resulted in turning analog print into digital print while keeping the same linear prose format.
I sometimes read books on my iPad.
I must have read three-quarters of 'Anna Karenina' on my phone. Which might be a record.
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.
Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space, not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium, too.
I've never read an ebook. Print every time.
'The Expats' would not exist without e-books.
You can't love a library of e-books. You can't furnish a room with e-books.
If we're going to build hardware, the thing we want to do is build reading goggles, so you can do hands-free reading.
The idea of an e-book has been around since the late 1970s, when researchers at Xerox PARC got on the case. Their prototype used millions of little magnetic particles, black on one side and white on the other, loosely embedded in the surface of a soft sheet of rubber.
