Earlier today the following quote appeared on Twitter (via Guy Charles and others), regarding Jane Friedman’s keynote interview at PBV:

Friedman on enhanced ebooks: “Vook is read and watch… I’m not interested in disrupting the reading experience; it’s sacrosanct.”

By coincidence, I ran across the following quote at almost the same moment while doing research for the previous post:

There are plenty of people who cringe at the cultural toll, who believe that the loss of books means losing the tactile, absorbing relationship with text we’ve enjoyed for centuries. MIT technology guru Nicholas Negroponte would like to remind them that people resisted indoor plumbing, too.

“They complained that if women didn’t do the laundry beside the river and at the fountain they would be alone, but other things started to serve those social purposes,’’ said Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, a festival panelist, and Deborah Porter’s significant other. “The reading experience is becoming more social. There are various ways of interacting on e-readers or computers, where people blog and use Twitter, and where the sharp line between the writer and the reader is going away.’’

I understand both of these perspectives, but relative to the functional merits of books they are both wrong, and both wrong for the same reason.   Read more