I guess my ideas for the ideal future of the book would be the past of the book. I love books, I love reading, being taken into new worlds of experience. Always ready to be seduced by the passions and obsessions of some new author, some new intelligence. Sometimes, want to be whisked away to somewhere I’ve already visited, and have started re-reading the books assigned during my childhood, books that were superficially appropriate for a teenager but really made almost no sense to me then—To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath…
Books are portable and the original ‘virtual reality’ tools. I shiver at all this talk of doing away with them. Making them digital to me seems to be turning libraries into bags of potato chips. Sure, we all pig out on them sometimes, but who ever considers a bag of potato chips memorable? “Ah yes, I remember that bag of Miss Vicky’s we ate on the beach at Ogunquit five years, back. Wasn’t it glorious?”
I want to write books and I want to be able to earn a living doing them. I don’t see how that’s possible with ebooks, as my name isn’t Jody Picoult or Dan Brown. On the other hand, with royalties as low as they are, maybe such a desire is more attainable with ebooks…I feel authors are being to made to pay the price for publishers’ poor track record of choosing what they have to put before the public. When I see what comes out of some houses, I despair.
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