Move Over Gutenberg: Will E-Books Spell the End of Paper And Ink?
Paul Levine, Novelist
Huffinton Post, Posted: July 7, 2010

I was standing in a circle of Chardonnay sippers at an art show in Santa Monica when the conversation turned to the future of reading. As a novelist, I had skin in the game, so I grabbed a canape, sidled over, and eavesdropped.
"I'll never buy one of those electronic gizmos," said a heavyset man in his fifties, a humanities professor. "I'd miss the smell of ink on paper, the conjuring of medieval libraries and ancient parchment."

Funny, I don't recall anyone blissfully sniffing their books until the threat from e-publishing appeared. Now, readers can't resist comparing their moldy old tomes to the finest Bordeaux.
Respectfully, I say, move over Gutenberg!

E-books are to traditional publishing what the internal combustion engine was to the horse and buggy. Some experts predict that half of all books will be digital downloads within two to three years. That's astonishing. For 600 years, Johannes Gutenberg's printing press and its progeny have produced our books, newspapers, and magazines. Now, in the blink of an electronic eye, the application of ink to paper is approaching obsolescence.

Complaints about progress are hardly new. When Gutenberg invented movable type, a Venetian judge whined that "The pen is a virgin, the printing press a whore." Some New York publishers have called Amazon and Google even worse names.

I'm all for nostalgia. I have dreamy memories of a rickety blue Bookmobile rumbling into my central Pennsylvania hometown, and my standing on tip-toes to haul down a well-worn volume about dinosaurs. But my Kindle holds more books than that old truck, and there are 600,000 more at Amazon just a few clicks away.

A recent newspaper headline asked: "Will the Kindle Save the Written Word?" The hope is that those techno-savvy kids will interrupt their music and games and videos and texts and tweets and blogs...and start reading.

Call me crazy, but I think they will. I predict that packing a portable library will soon become a hip way to impress the opposite sex. More so, hopefully, than a barbed wire tattoo.

So why is that wine-sipping professor so afraid of the Kindle or Nook or iPad or Kobo? There will still be books in hardcover, trade paperback, and mass-market.

Or will there?
The answer at Huffington Post.