[ahi]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

I disagree, mostly because restoring at least some of that functionality is merely a technical challenge, rather than a structural issue.

It seems to me that often the push for reinvention comes strongest from people that have little understanding about how and why old books work (to facilitate ease of reading) to begin with... which ought to worry anybody that thinks the present state of the eBook world has any bearing whatsoever on what is to come.

Originally Posted by davidspitzer

but doesn't evolution require change? - many people refused to give up their typewriters when word processors and eventually computers displaced them. It does not mean typewriters were bad or computers were good, its just a new way of doing things. I think most would agree though, except for nostalgic reasons, they would never use a typewriter now instead of computer?

Correct. People's attitudes about those things don't mean a damn thing.

The typewriter however was a less useful device than a computer's word processor. Objectively.

Originally Posted by davidspitzer

You may not pay for textbooks and paper to print them up, but the forests do and the landfills do. I would not consider myself a treehugger in the classical sense, but iv'e had a realization of late that we have the means to curtail our paper addition, but we simply choose not to becuase it requires a little extra effort on our parts.

The human race show no signs of slowing down in it's population expansion and at the same time we increase our individual gross consumption.

I know its hard; we think that whatever one person does could not possibly make a difference,but if everyone takes the same stance then we are guaranteed not to make a difference. Change is hard, there is no doubt, but if we are all willing to just read that one paper, that one report, that one email, or that one book online instead of printing it, soon we will look back in amazement about how we used to cut down millions of trees a year and lug around reams of paper just to get our daily fix of information

Why do you keep arguing that forest depletion necessitates that people acquiesce to eBooks forever remaining the garbage that they are today? Or is that not your intended point?

- Ahi