Why e-books will never replace real books
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Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things.
In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late 20th century: McLuhan was an academic media theorist who ended up being called a "high priest of popular culture." He was big enough to be a standing joke on Laugh-In ("Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?") to appear in a cameo in Annie Hall, to get interviewed in Playboy. One of the fundamental things McLuhan said was that new media change us and change the world. We see that principle in every kind of technology. When films started to talk, we started to talk in their phrases and cadences. When musical notation was invented, it took music into new dimensions of complexity and length. When computers started to link up on the Internet … You get the idea.
McLuhan declared that the two epochal cultural developments of the last millennium were, first, the invention of movable type in the 15th centur
Original Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2258054
