I walk an odd sort of tightrope, really.
On the one hand I am an unabashed electronic-text enthusiast. I love this stuff. I think it’s going to take over large swathes of the world, and I don’t regret that prospect even a smidge. Regret it? I’m going to help bring it about.
I have utterly run out of patience with the book-smellers. I really have. They can stay back in the nineteenth century (yes, I said nineteenth and I meant it); the rest of us have work to do.
On the other hand, I constantly rail about the average technologist’s utter cluelessness about the wondrous bit of information technology that is the print book. Look, folks, print has a lot of lessons to teach. We have a hell of a nerve making noise about how we’ll supplant print; we’ve barely begun to learn those lessons.
No wonder I’m so uncomfortable in so many discussions of text, print or e-.
