I recently bought a book about the future of books. It’s called The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, and features twenty-six authors describing what they think might become of literature. Given the collection’s prophetic subtitle, and that I was reading it on my new, still-extraterrestrial-seeming iPad, I was surprised to find that very few of the authors mention e-books. Those who do tend to regard them with dread and disgust, like a farmhand studying a handful of fallen locusts. One author compared e-books to astronaut food; another to Mortal Kombat. Another suggested that perhaps we could create e-readers that would exactly resemble books, with cardboard covers and hundreds of papery pages and so on, but whose cover graphics and print could morph from Salinger to Tolstoy in a click.
