Blankbaby points to this article on Gizmodo about e-books not living up to the hype. Gizmodo talked with Micah Burch from Vertical, the publishing house that puts out Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha. Burch says “Vertical’s strategy has involved incorporating the Japanese design aesthetic, and so our books are intended to be objects that you want to have around as well as good reading material,” and I think that is a good reminder of what you might lose when reading something only in e-book format. One of the hooks to get someone to buy all the volumes of Buddha is the excellent book design — the way the spines of the individual books come together to form a single picture couldn’t be translated into electronic format.

Sanford May from Gizmodo says “Reading the work of Michael Chabon, I developed an intense interest in Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, particularly the infamous Lolita, and I keep a text copy of that one on my PowerBook. It’s there for convenient search, but reading Lolita straight through, I pull out the print edition.” Using the e-book format for searching but the paper copy of the book for actual reading makes sense. I do think that electronic reference books have a lot of potential, but I think it will take some time to develop a gadget that would duplicate the experience of reading a paper book.