A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.
I've got a vendetta to destroy the Net, to make everyone go to the library. I love the organic thing of pen and paper, ink on canvas. I love going down to the library, the feel and smell of books.
Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.
Our civilization depends largely on paper.
We live in such a digital age. Paper is going out of our lives. A poem on paper is tangible.
It's really been a long-term dream of mine to have an alternative to wood-based paper. Over half of the trees cut in the world are cut for paper products.
Digital society is born when your people refuse to use paper. And in our country, we know that our people refuse to use paper. If you arrive at such a point in your development, you have to make your digital state always secure.
We don't know where print is going.
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
I understand the nostalgia of having paper to feel and smell when you read it, but I would rather have fond memories of newspapers that have become obsolete than fond memories of beautiful forests that have become obsolete.
I do worry that the days of the physical paper are seriously numbered.
I still like the physicality of papers.
My gut feeling is that paper and ink are going to be with us for a long time yet, and in substantial quantities, though certainly books are now going to be available in other forms.
The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.
People might say paper is dead or dying, but actually, it's not at all. It's just more rarified. The choice to send paper has more meaning because of the fact that you don't have to.
