Very good talk, my mind is still reeling from all the statistics you so easily laid out and your follow-up here is equally disconcerting. The dichotomy between the ebook and the event and what it will all mean in the immediate future has got me contemplating the role of the fine press and a little sleep loss.

I’m not opposed to ebooks in any way and there is much out there which the format is perfectly suited. My big concern is the future, not mine though – in a hundred years or more what will cultural anthropologists and historians have to make sense of us. Much of what we know of the past has come from correspondence, diaries and private memoirs NOT the historians of the time. In our age of email, social networking sites, tweets and text where is the trail? Less than 30 years ago none of this was in place, I fear the last 20 will be a black hole with no immediate sign of things improving.

Oh well, a couple thousand years was a good run for the analog book.