If you happen to be a writer, one of the great benisons of having children is that your personal culture-mine is equipped with its own canaries.

A few days ago a blogger who identifies himself as just "Philip" took to his site to recount his experience of reading War and Peace – specifically, a 99¢ version as sold through Barnes and Noble's Nook store. A contextually important reminder: the Nook is Barnes and Noble's answer to Amazon's Kindle and the two devices have invariably been pitted against each other in a kind of ereader war.

When, however, Philip came across the line, "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern", the Kindle/Nook rivalry wasn't foremost in his mind. Instead, he thought he'd just stumbled on an unorthodox verb-translation or some other minor textual hiccup. It was only when that rogue "Nookd" struck again that he realised, via the text's search function, that every instance of the word "kindle" or "kindle" had, in fact, been changed to "Nook" and "Nookd".

Which means Tolstoy has been subjected to indignities – and absurdities – such as this: "When the flame of the sulphur splin

Publication used to mean preservation but it no longer does. Let me explain.

When a print book is published its metadata is literally attached to its content. The author and title, publisher and imprint, price, ISBN and barcode, as well as the size, the shape, the binding are clear, easily referenced at a glance. Part of the complicated process of digitizing books that the Hathi Trust, the Internet Archive, and Google, for example, faced was how to record and connect all of this information to a digital file. For scanned and even more seriously for born-digital e-books, as Digital Book World pointed out earlier this month (Brian O’Leary clearly agrees), the matter is more complex.

First of all, it’s not always readily obvious that the metadata is correct. But just as important, the connection of metadata to digital book content is more tenuous. Without a hard copy to refer back to, a piece of information that goes missing may not be retrievable. For this reason (and more), the Intern

The Ecstasy of Influence, now the title of his recent collection of writings, often addresses the process of integrating and "cobbling together" ideas and culture to make something new. Yet, stories Lethem relates of hosting "mailing parties" for the Philip K Dick Society or working in a bookstore seem like snapshots from pre-digital age. Recently I talked with the author about our rapidly dematerializing culture as well as appropriation as an art practice:

Over the past several days, a certain Star Trek: The Next Generation prose piece has ensnared the popular imagination the world over. It's a story that's been recycled since time immemorial, due to its sheer cross-cultural thematic resonance.

I am, of course, referring to author Kitty Glitter's Amazon Kindle tour de force Wesley Crusher: Teenage Fuck Machine, an edifying fable in which the Enterprise's resident rascal has a sexual awakening during a threesome with a barbed-penised cat man. Also, Captain Jean Luc Picard is walloped in the gonads.

This is the story of Horse_ebooks, beloved online automaton, and how I tracked down its human master.

Horse_ebooks is a Twitter spam bot originally set up to promote horse-ebooks.com, an online store of horse-themed ebooks with a retro design equal parts GeoCities and MySpace. In addition to tweeting spam links, Horse_ebooks has apparently been programed to evade Twitter's spam filters by posting random snatches of text it scrapes from books and websites. About seven times a day, Horse_ebooks spurts out bits of context-free nonsense, like: "Worms – oh my god WORMS," and "I noticed that my hair grew faster from spending time in my pyramid."

E-books Can't Burn: Could it be that ebooks bring us closer to the Could it be the fact that the e-book thwarts our ability to find particular lines by remembering their position on the page? Or our love of scribbling comments (of praise and disgust) in the margin? It’s true that on first engagement with the e-book we become aware of all kinds of habits that are no longer possible, skills developed over many years that are no longer relevant. We can’t so easily flick through the pages to see where the present chapter ends, or whether so and so is going to die now or later. In general, the e-book discourages browsing, and though the bar at the bottom of the screen showing the percentage of the book we’ve completed lets us know more or less where we’re up to, we don’t have the reassuring sense of the physical weight of the thing (how proud children are when they get through their first long tome!), nor the computational pleasures of page numbers (Dad, I read 50 pages today). This can be a problem for academics: it’s hard to give a proper reference if you don’t have page numbers.

Horse_ebooks is having a moment.

Of the accounts that follow me on Twitter, half are spambots. About 15% are companies or organizations whose social media interns found me on a list somewhere, and another 15% are something in between: not definitely bots, but not exactly humans. Whatever they are, they're not "listening" in any meaningful sense. Among the remaining group are some people I like, some people I like a lot, some people I don't know, and a bunch of technology PR professionals who don't really have a choice.

There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it.

For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual. Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

What is a book, really? For that matter, what is an article, a record, or a movie? For each of these, I have a very clear picture in my mind that says more about when I came of age than about the content itself. When I think of books, my mind retrieves an image of my grandparents’ bookshelves, which I used to browse after school as a child. Records? I see the CD stacks of my teenage years, collected from local music shops and trading with friends. And somehow, thinking about movies still produces images of VHS tapes and memories of frustratedly fixing the tracking on my VCR. No doubt, future generations will have very different associations. (Or, more disturbingly, some readers of this column won’t even know what a VCR is. Just Google it.)

Words, music, and films are all content experiences that we’ve come to know just as much by their containers as by their substance.

We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.

But really, who cares? 3

Hunting surface analogs between the printed and the digital book is a dangerous honeypot. There is a compulsion to believe the magic of a book lies in its surface.

In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. Relationships between ideas and recipients. Between writer and reader. Between readers and other readers — all as writ over time.

The future book — the digital book — is no longer an immutable brick. It's ethereal and networked, emerging publicly in fits and starts. An artifact ‘complete’ for only the briefest of moments. Shifting deliberately. Layered with our shared marginalia. And demanding engagement with the promise of community implicit in its form.

One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The Island of Dr Moreau on a flight to Japan. I started reading War And Peace. Again. Then I downloaded an app which was a book by a writer who hadn’t been published conventionally. On his website, he revealed he’d had 14,000 downloads in three months. My eyes nearly fell out. It was the final prod I needed. I was going to make an app. It’s what Arthur would have wanted. My idea was to expand on a photography exhibition I’d put together in 2009 called Stills From The Unmade Film of a Half-Written Novel. The title says it all. I’d taken 20 short extracts of the novel I was writing, and still am writing, which is about time-travelling air conditioning salesmen trying to save the world in the 1960s, and made 20 images based on them as if they were production stills from a film. It was installed in Norwich Arts Centre for a month.

It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism and reconfiguring serious study of the novel as a bloodless, quasi-objective matter of empirical data analysis. In this New Left Review essay, which touches on his idea of “distant reading” — the opposite of close reading, the careful scrutiny of particular works— Moretti declares, “We know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” If e-readers live up to their potential, he just may get his wish.

McLemee rightly cautions against making e-books vs. their printed and bound counterparts an either-or proposition: “I am biased in favor of reading itself, rather than towards one format,” he explains. In the aggregate, more reading will likely happen thanks to e-readers. As they become more prevalent, they will make more books accessible to more readers. 

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world. Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium too. Music, film, newspapers, blogs, videogames—it’s the nature of a digital society that all these come at us in parallel, through the same channels, consumed simultaneously or in seamless sequence.

Philip Dodd goes to one of Britain's largest second hand bookshops and is joined by a panel of publishers, authors and an audience of readers for a public debate that tackles the vexed question: Is the book dead? As e-books outsell hardbacks for the first time is reading itself facing a future that is empowered or impoverished?

The venue is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which famously occupies a former railway station. Onstage with Philip will be guests writer David Almond, author of the prize-winning novel Skellig, Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the Book, thriller writer Louise Welsh and the historian Sheila Hingley.

Just recently, yet another device to read books electronically has just been launched - experts predict it will make this a mainstream activity. So Philip asks: why we are once again hearing concerns that innovations like e-readers and the iPad impede our imagination, shorten our attention span and make us intellectually shallow. Others argue

Who Goes There? is a science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. under the pen name Don A. Stuart, published August 1938 in Astounding Stories. In 1973, the story was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written, and published with the other top vote-getters in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two. The novella has twice been adapted as a motion picture: firstly in 1951 as The Thing from Another World and later in 1982 as The Thing.

As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change?

America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and, indirectly, the Bible. The country’s success depended on high levels of literacy, freedom of the press, allegiance to the rule of law (found in books) and a common language across a continent. American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing.

But reading and writing, like all technologies, are dynamic. In ancient times, authors often dictated their books. Dictation sounded like an uninterrupted series of letters, so scribes wrote down the letters in one long continuous string, justastheyoccurinspeech. Text was written without spaces between words until the 11th century. This continuous script made books hard to read, so only a few people were accomplished at reading them aloud to others. Being able to read silently to yourself w