Maureen –
And yes, that solar flare article is really freaky!
Although I do wish they gave more of an idea of how concerned we should be about this relative to concerns about other potential disasters, rather than just seeding the article with a ton of quotes comparing it to Hurricane Katrina. But it’s certainly effective in raising public awareness of a larger threat of potentially immediate concern, I suppose.

As an aside, I kind of wanted to smack the “idiot” commenter.
People on the Internet always know more about your personal needs than you do. ;P

Andy -
It’s not like film and TV replaced the theater, after all—they complement it.
Although hysteria about complete replacement is indeed unfounded at this point (though obviously I’m guilty of occasional bursts of paranoia, and general wibbling), I think the concerns about the kind of hit that the publishing and bookselling industries are going to take are legitimate. Given how hard it already is for booksellers that aren’t Barnes & Nobles or Amazon to survive, I think it’s inevitable that that trend will only accelerate, which makes me more than sad.

I think your comparison to film/TV & theater is apt here. Although film & TV may not have replaced theater, they decreased its cultural prominence (obviously), and again, for reasons of accessibility and affordability. And not like theater ever guaranteed instant success and big bucks, but in the past few years, it’s been especially hard for new productions to stay afloat without having big-screen stars in them, and/or being based on outside media like films or popular musicians’ work. Which, hey, is a great way to adapt to and take advantage of people’s expectations, but one also worries about loss of representation of fresh talent and ideas. In the same way, every time an independent book store goes under, it represents a significant loss of history, character, and diversity. And, particularly since I’m an evolutionary biologist, loss of diversity in almost any situation inherently makes me nervous.

/extended babble

Are you covering The Girl Who Circumnavigated… in your dissertation? :)

[puts on grad student hat]
I’m skeptical of the whole e-book hysteria going around; it’s understandable, but I don’t think it’s founded on anything but fear (NB: I haven’t read the Atwood article either, being super lazy myself!) The codex (ie what we think of as print books) and e-readers are competing technologies, true. But as far as I can see the e-readers’ main advantages over print are 1) storage capability and 2) affordability. I think they’ll replace text books (especially science ones, that have to be updated all the time), simply because it’s more economical and efficient. But I don’t think they’ll replace the print codex mainly for the reasons you all have already pointed out: they’re not durable, and their storage advantage is undermined by the instability of digital formats, not to mention the major privacy/copyright issues that come up (as I understand it, at the moment you don’t really “own” any ebook you purchase the same way you do a print book—you simply lease the right to access it for a period of time).

[doffs grad student hat]

I just wish everyone would take a deep breath! It’s too soon to make any predictions or moral arguments. It’s not like film and TV replaced the theater, after all—they complement it. I think it’ll be much the same with e-readers.

As an aside, I kind of wanted to smack the “idiot” commenter. It’s true that Kindle screens are supposed to be better on your eyes, but there are some people (like myself) for whom that technology just doesn’t work.

On the subject of the Publishing industry, with the “rise” in ebooks, and ebook piracy. I’m wondering what the college text-book industry will do. Their only sure-fire way to keep the market stranglehold is to keep the printed books.

* albeit 90% of the time illegally obtained.

K–I hadn’t heard that projection. Sigh.

Plus, people are lazy.
This is the major determinant of… well, pretty much everything. Most people simply aren’t that invested in how words are delivered to them. Okay, I just lumped not-caringness in with laziness, which is neither fair nor always accurate, but… you get the point. And among the people who do care about print vs. digital, I’m guessing that a number of people who are defenders of print right now might not even care about it so much in the near future if all computer screens were to become easier on the eyes, like Kindle screens, on top of lowered prices and increased availability and ubiquity.

That was all rather incoherent and disorganized, bah. I think the point that I was trying to make was that no matter how you look at it, people who are deeply attached to the physicality of the book are a minority. And sadly, I’m sure this will become increasingly true; it’s not that hard to imagine households in the near future in which children are raised predominantly with e-readers, simply because prices will have dropped sufficiently for a digital library to be more cost-effective than a physical one. Certainly I can think of several science-fiction stories in which the books were only read through the equivalent of e-readers.

Maureen –
For me, when I walk into someone else’s home, I generally make a bee-line for the bookshelves (while trying not to be too obvious and rude about it). They tell me something about the person–their interests, their reading habits, the way they treat their books.
So, so true! Great observation. I always have to work not to be offended when people don’t pay attention to my bookshelves – it’s as if they ignored my children or something. ;P