rest of the world.

Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook
stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the
other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks
every day.

This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:

1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
[GRAPHIC]

2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day
[GRAPHIC]

These two certainties begged a lot of questions.

[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]

* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper

* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how
good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how
evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)

* You can't take your ebook into the tub

* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer