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All Jobs is saying is that fewer Americans are reading books. Is this news to anyone? This does not, however, translate into eink readers being useless, as they can be used to read lots of other material, as we all know. Nor do I see this as any reason for pessimism. Things change all the time. A hundred years ago there were far fewer forms of entertainment, no TV, radio, no mass-market movies, etc... Books were more dominant. Now, for many the leading form of entertainment is the cellphone: how many of you saw the story (I read it in the NYTimes) about how the Japanese are writing entire novels on their celllphones. In light of the small screen and the cramped keyboard what this apparently leads to is the creation of what are really long text messages. As Garrison Keillor would put it, that's certainly "different". And book reading as we have known it for a long time may disappear into something else. It should be very interesting.
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