Our contemporary existence is the "right now" availability of things. We want things "now". This is what anything electronic gives us. One of these things is the electronic book. We can have it in a few seconds, just download it, if you have the means. Doctorow gives us ideas about the e-book [pages 111/112]:
- Good marketing: giving away a "taste" of the previous series to get you to buy the new one
- They complement paper books: when you don't have electronic access, you have the paper book.
- The book is a "practice": a medium to getting content, but so is the e-book and with added manipulability, i.e., text editing, conversion to pdf files, etc.
- They offer better financial opportunity for a writer: They are indexed on search engines, reaching more markets instantly.
The electronic book is here to stay, but so is the printed book. The reader who loves to run her/his fingers through the pages and experience a personal connection with the printed book will always be a part of a printed book reader's ritual; the physicality of the experience deepens the relationship with the printed book and its content. My personal experience is that, while I enjoy the practicality and efficiency of the e-book, I cannot abandon the opportunity to react to the content of the book and write my personal notes in the margins. I cherish my printed books because of the opportunity they give me to expressively experience their content (I like to write on the margins and, sometimes, I pick out special covers for them--different textures); very rarely do I sell or give away my books.
Blanca, you are not alone in still feeling a certain fondness for the printed book. Defenders of the ebook might argue that you can annotate electronic texts, or personalize them in other ways. But... as you note, as Doctorow argues, we're not really faced with an either/or decision here. We can have both the printed and electronic book, and their "affordances" are orthogonal to each other (meaning they complement each other rather than competing on the same ground).
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