[Panurge]

I'm a professor, a director of a library, and an author, as well as an owner of a Sony Reader (to say nothing of computers dating back to the seventies and user of computers dating back to the sixties--I'm 67).
I am also interested in semiotics and a number of disciplines that deal with the whole problem of signs and meanings, to say nothing of foreign languages ranging from French to Russian and Chinese.
I mention all of this only to iindicate that the problem we face is no less than monumental. It affects everyone from the most academic type (me) to the casual reader of best sellers (not me).
For a comparable shift in technology, we have to go back to the transition from oral to written preservation (various dates from 1500 or so BC to the 15th century CE), the development of moveable type (Gutenberg) to the 1980s or 90s. I am in a profession that works at converting earlier modes of preserving information into later ones. I move from oral transmission to manuscript to early typesetting to linotype to photo-offset to digital to--whatever we have now.
Print was viewed as a miracle in the early 16th century; it changed the relationship of reader to information in a decisive fashion (Elizabeth Eisenberg, Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galasxy), etc. The digital revolution retrieves both the oral and the print revolutions.
We're going to be sorting this business out for some time to come. Confusion and concern will be ours for some time to come. Get used to it.
I love the new technology. As the director of a library, I see it as an extension of the goal of all libraries, which is to make information available to those who need it. I don't care what format it is in, so long as it is available to those who need it to need it to further our understanding of ourselves and the world.
But the situation in which we find ourselves is unprecedented. How shall we keep up with everything that is available to us, even in the limited arrangements of the present? This is the dilemma I face as the head of a library and as a researcher in my own right. The hardware is wonderful, but how can we navigate through this morass of information? That is my problem. The future lies not simply in availability but in the the ability to navigate, identify, and judge what is important and what is superfluous. That is the professorial side of me. I love the hardware, but I recognize that it offers new challenges that we have not yet begun to comtemplate.