On Books

William Pannapacker, writing as Thomas H. Benton, has a great new column in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.  Addressing the issue of the death of books, Pannapacker claims:  “The end of the book has, by now, been debunked.  The electronic book is no substitute for the paperback, after all.   Amazon’s Kindle is no more viable than the automated feeding system demonstrated in Chaplin’s Modern Times.  Besides, computer software and digital media change so fast that paper–for all its seeming fragility–remains the surest means of projecting a text into the distant future (except, perhaps, for clay tablets).”  The whole column is worth a look.  -DS