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the heaviest buyers of e-books are now buying more, not fewer, printed books

Clay Shirky

Not once in that half century has anyone successfully invented anything that feels like the digital version of a book. Books online, whether in a Kindle or Google Books, are always (cue McLuhan) the old medium populating the new.

It found that "enhanced" e-books might be distracting. Kids who read enhanced e-books—ones with interactive, multimedia experiences—were more engaged with them physically, but in the end they remembered fewer narrative details than those who read print books or basic e-books

And some studies have found that part of the difference between the way people absorb information from e-books versus paper might be due to approaching e-books differently—in one test, participants didn’t regulate their study time with digital books like they did with paper texts, leading to worse performances.

The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement.

The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces.

To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something's got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves.

Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

The initial e-book explosion is starting to look like an aberration. The technology's early adopters, a small but enthusiastic bunch, made the move to e-books quickly and in a concentrated period.

the shift from e-readers to tablets may also be dampening e-book purchases

The fact that an e-book can't be sold or given away after it's read also reduces the perceived value of the product.

Isidore, the bishop of Seville, remarked how reading “the sayings” of thinkers in books “render[ed] their escape from memory less easy.”

Shakespeare has Hamlet call his memory “the book and volume of my brain.”

Books provide a supplement to memory, but they also, as Eco puts it, “challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it.”

What is a book, anyway? An examination of the EPUB 3 draft standard reveals that most of the differences between an EPUB book and a website boil down to one core difference: the book is self-contained.

Kelly paints a future where access to content is free and immediate, discovery of it is personalised and social, consumption of it is fragmented, and everything is interlinked.

eBook sales are down 13%, audiobooks are up 38%, colouring books are up 1,100% (!), and – according to most analysts – sales of regular books are back in the black. This wasn’t the world we expected. Your stuff may be easier to acquire (thanks to the cloud and Amazon Prime) and consume (thanks to smartphones, a reading category that’s grown by 7% this year), but the core product – the book – is no more shareable or fluid than it was when Wired Magazine first hit the shelves in 1993.

About 82 percent of Power Buyers (consumers who acquire e-books on a weekly basis) say they prefer e-books over print and nearly 70 percent of Non-Power Buyers say they now prefer e- over print.

If three-quarters of an undefined survey group likes paper but a majority of the actual customer base likes digital, what are the chances that most of that 75% don’t buy very many books in the first place?

Mitchell said that qualitative comments about preferring physical books included things like "I collect", "I like the smell", and "I want full bookshelves". "Books are status symbols, you can't really see what someone has read on their Kindle,"

America was founded on the written word.

the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and, indirectly, the Bible

Being able to read silently to yourself was considered an amazing talent. Writing was an even rarer skill. In 15th-century Europe only one in 20 adult males could write.