It’s all rather cold and unromantic. There was no feeling of excitement as I opened the front cover for the first time (there was no front cover), nowhere to indulge the jealous desire to pen my name onto the first page, to take possession of the book and make it my own.
David Shone's encounter with a Sony Portable Reader at the British Library speaks profoundly to the disenchantment that many book collectors experience when encountering electronic books. So, too, does Shone's further observation:
Given that much of the demand for the Kindle, Amazon’s answer to the e-book, is being driven by the romance and erotic romance, one might be tempted to observe that someone looking to read Lori Foster’s Real Men Last All Night would probably feel let down by a battery that doesn’t.
Possession. Always on access. Is this what the great battle between real books and electronic books ultimately boils down to?
We decided to cruise the Internet in search of answers. Here's a little bit of what we found....
- On Owning Books
- Books Do Furnish a Life
- Kindle DRM's the Death of Scholarship?
- The Pleasure and Pain of Owning Books
- The Freedom of Not Owning Books
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