In the final analysis, more people
will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer
pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be
the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they
promote the dead-tree editions.
2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that
he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the
other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to
me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can
copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to
build concordances of characters, places and events.
3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you
own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the
book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and
artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a
"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and
it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good
question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR
SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a
text-editor as I could hope for).
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