“There are no two ways about it,” wrote John C. Abell in a 2011 article over at Wired. “E-books are here to stay.” Sure, they were “fundamentally flawed,” but that didn’t stop him from poking fun at the “ambiguous tactile argument” from some “late-to-never adopters.”
At the time, I thought Abell was full of it. Reading between the lines, he seemed to be predicting the demise of print. On the one hand, he acknowledged that “books are legacy items that may never go away”; on the other, he wrote that they “have been forever marginalized as a niche medium.”
Well…it looks like we’ve already hit peak digital. The publishing industry “suffered a bad attack of technodazzle,” writes Simon Jenkins. “It failed to distinguish between newness and value.”
Tech isn’t always the answer, it seems—particularly when there was never a question in the first place.
