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
* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
None of these seemed like very good explanations for the "failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their grandmothers won't use them — well, my grandmother sends me email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her Florida retirement condo)?
The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It seemed to me that electronic books are *different* from paper books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a little about what the book has gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the book is the history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution.