LIES. My profile page indicates that I have submitted 45 corrections since last June, and not a single one has had its status move beyond “submitted.” I’m guessing “report content error” is just one of those feel-good buttons. I did find a funny mistake, though, and thought I would share it with you since Amazon is ignoring my calls. From the Kindle edition of Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star:

“all [Zarathustra] taught was understanding the earthly elements, the turn of the year, the one God. And three simples rules to live by: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Also a belief in the purifying nature of ire, which was central to the faith and a symbol of the Almighty.”

FIRE, you heathens.

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Of COURSE I stood up for The Book (in this case, Patrick McDonnell’s Me, Jane), but, really we all did–moderator Nina Lindsay and my co-panelists Kristin McLean and Jason Griffey–in the March 4 panel on e-books sponsored by the Bay Area Library and Information System.

We were speaking in the wake of HarperCollins’s announcement about their new rules for libraries and ebooks, but that didn’t take up as much of the discussion as I thought it would. Mainly, this is because ebook-reading seems to be mostly an adult thing, at least at this point. Kristen’s research seems to bear this out–that while kids are adept consumers of various digital products and devices, they still seem to like their book-reading on paper between covers. And Jason acknowledged that while he expects his daughter to do ever more of her reading on screen as she ages, for now books are definitely part of the mix.

You know, there’s reading and then there are books. I already do most of my reading on a screen, don’t you? It seems to me that the future is going to involve a rather interesting parsing of what we mean by recreational reading, and just what part librarians will play in that mix.

My point with Me, Jane was that some books depend upon format more than others, that paper (in this case) allows you to see the textures that are an important part of the storytelling strategy, and that page-turns can be crucial. And my visit later that weekend with grandson Miles got me thinking about something else: kids want their screens to do stuff– move, squeak, respond. There are a lot of books where those things simply don’t need to happen; in fact, we don’t want them to happen. But does this mean printed books will survive, or that a taste for no-frills long-form reading will die off?

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