copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to
build concordances of characters, places and events.

3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you
own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the
book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and
artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a
"practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and
it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good
question. I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR
SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a
text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them
into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn
them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over
to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review
copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my
readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats
[DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile
can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed,
perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten
minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF
or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for
a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently
cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books
confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust
settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel
less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the
text.