[radleyp]

Susan Jacoby in her new book "The Age of American Unreason" (which I am, of course, reading on my Kindle) refers to the "e-book fizzle": she describes reading as "antithetical to the whole experience of reading on computers....", since the digitization of text on screens has, in her view, given us the habit of looking at things in small doses. This point has been made by others before, but if it is true, then the increasing popularity (if there really is any significant increase) of ebooks will change the very nature of the writing itself. Just note the example of the Japanese writing on cellphones: it produces long text messages and not the writing we are considering here, the writing of longer pieces such as books. And this also means that the parallels with mp3 players is inapt: mp3 selections are, for the most part, short.