How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write

The following article by author Steven Johnson appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. It discusses the effects of technology on reading and the future of the book, seeing both positives and negatives. Because of the article's length, I posted some of the main points below, in addition to the link to the article.

• "Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own it."
  
• "Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovation to bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg."
  
• "Think of it as a permanent, global book club... Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world."
  
• "This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too... readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper."
  
• "A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors."
  
• "With books becoming part of this universe, 'booklogs' will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html