Reading by the Digital Pool

Just weeks before Simon and Schuster announced a deal to sell e-books on the document-sharing website Scribd.com, this Wired article from Clive Thompson points to the book as "the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn't embraced the digital age."

Of course music and film went digital more quickly than books. While books were still dipping their toes in the digital pool, music and film were pushed in by forces like Napster and YouTube. One wonders what form the marrriage of pixels and publishing will take. Thompson points to projects like Book Glutton and Doris Lessing's online version of The Golden Notebook, both of which make possible a communal sort of book discovery through web-based annotation.

It's hard to envision what the publishing industry's digital tipping point will look like, though I'm certain that it isn't merely the porting over of reading to devices like the Amazon Kindle. Whatever it is, I'm all over it! Though when that time comes, I'll still find refuge in the solitary pleasure that is reading ink on paper.

_{Photo by Annie Mole}