[WEB4LIB] Re: NYT magazine piece on e-books

[Roy Tennant]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Tom Peters wrote [in part]:

> At this point in the development of the *debate* about the future of the
> book, I wish I could find a good, calm,
> historically/technologically/theoretically informed summary of the primary
> arguments for and against ebooks.  Does anyone know of such a document?   

That's what we need all right, although I would prefer it be stated not as
"primary arguments for and against ebooks", since I think that is really
the problem with this "debate". It should not be "for and against", but
rather the relative merits of both e-books and p-books. Although I'm a
firm believe that p-books aren't going away any time soon, I'm just as
firm a believer that neither will e-books. Nor should either of them go
away. So what "niches" do they properly fill in the communication ecology?
For what purposes will we turn to one over the other? *That* is well worth
an article, and would do more to inform this discussion than anything I've
yet seen.
Roy