Los Angeles Times writer Meghan Daum has a few words for those who lament the death of print.
From the piece on the Powell's Books blog...
It's easy for Luddites like me to smirk at technology (and, for the record: I am hereby proclaiming cinema lobbies highly dangerous places because of the number of people who are checking their BlackBerries and Iphones while exiting the movie and literally walking smack into each other.) But, as an author, I'd be crazy if I pooh-poohed anything that facilitated the reading process. A staggering number of books are published each year (half a million in the U.S. along according to some counts.) Most of them are read by few people other than the author's mother or perhaps some dissertation committee (and, let's face it, these committees usually just look at the table of contents.) The way I see it, there's a tremendous about of hubris inherent in being an author. To ask someone to sit down for several hours to read what you've written is to make an enormous request. So why should we turn our noses up at anything that makes that process easier?
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