It's not beyond me, I just personally don't benefit from it or need it to enjoy a novel. Like I said, I do a vast majority of my reading on the subway. Physical books are a pain in the ass compared to my Kindle, especially a hardcover. I mean yes, I know books are not INHERENTLY a pain in the ass, but compared to the Kindle it's night and day reading on the subway.

More than that - there is a historical need for printed media. This is not something that can be overemphasized.

Digital media is iffy at best. Movie directors will re-edit scenes or digitally touch-up effects. DRM on books means that after X amount of time, you no longer have that information for your own use. Music people now use digital touch-up techniques to prevent off-pitched sounds.

The great thing about books - and analog as a whole, really - is that they're a measuring stick for their point in time. People are dumb enough to think that Orwell's 1984 is some overarching criticism of all forms of government - but what it is is a criticism from Orwell's time of writing the book. But the digital age allows you to now go in and re-edit that book, make it what the author didn't want. Other times, if the writer is still alive, he can go back in and re-edit the book and make a new edition. Which edition would you want more? The original, the new one by the author or the one that was edited by someone trying to be politically correct or (current) historically factual or whatever?

And which one is more Orwellian? The book 1984 - or the fact that digital print allows this form of Newspeak so easily?

No, the digital age is just bad news as a whole. It has its place as something fun and small like Internet Forums but the idea that important literary works for the future of a literate race are going to survive on it is just plain silly. Its going to become harder to record history because now anyone can join in - theres no accrediting people posting stuff on CNN blogs or Wikipedias, so if 50 really diligent people decide that HEY GHANDI WAS A FAGGOT, they can really make it a tough time for people who are looking for the facts.

Midna, the bigger argument in this case is that it is a much bigger profit in general, for the publishing companies to go totally digital. The paperback mass markets are offering their prices at $6~$9 often times cheaper than their digital counterparts, but that often times is with a grave cost.

To put a point to this, the Los Angeles Times no longer does delivery M-F for free because their subscription sales revenues do not cover them. They still do the weekend deliveries for $1.50 subscription per week. So people are paying LA Times roughly $5~7 a month to get their papers delivered to their doors on the weekdays. THIS IS STILL DIRT CHEAP, though maybe not as cheap as the amount of electricity you use to charge batteries on your iPad or Kindle to go through the same amount of news/information you can searching on the internet/news website. This subscription fee nearly does not cover the amount of cost it takes to run journalist staff (who they had to lay off hundreds in the last decade), have press offices and news rooms running 24/7, pay the electricity bill on the building that houses at 4-story building tall press, not to mention the labor and facility costs on warehousing and distribution. I have not even grazed the printing process/costs yet.

The printing industry made a few good moves to move forward to eco/environment-friendly newspapers such as the water-based ink printed newspapers like USA Today and San Francisco Cronicle. They use water-based inks instead of traditional oil based inks so the overall chemical impact and pollution on the environment can be reduced (oil-based inks are managed by solvents which have harsh chemicals, and need to run on water constantly--therefore, potentially causing more pollutants to be released in BOTH water and air--plus, when the paper gets thrown away and decomposes(hopefully), the inks don't leave harsh chemicals in the soil). The big guns, fortunately, can still run on traditional lithograph print, but like Sprout mentioned in the opening post, a lot of newspaper companies have already shut their doors. In California, close to 150+ local newspaper publishers have already closed their doors, some big ones such as the Fresno Bee.

You cannot simply pick up a newspaper and think it's only the articles that matter. What part of an economic structure it plays, argumentatively, IS an archaic infrastructure that's been in place for the last couple centuries. What I'd like to argue, is that I hope that there will be some connection between the new digital technologies to keep print alive. Because no matter how useful a Kindle/Knook/whatever e-Reader there is, there is no comparable resource of all of these in one small package that arrives at my door on Sunday morning:

• Global News
• Economic Data
• Critical Political Issues
• Weather Forecast
• Places to Eat / check out
• Movie times
• Local News
• Local Events
• Entertainment in the area (that I may not be aware of)
• Obscure and random things to do
• Apartment listings
• Obituaries
• Coupons
• Sales for local Electronic/Grocery stores
• etc., etc., etc...

I can get through a lot of this information in about an hour. No matter how spoon-feeding the eReaders and facebook/twitter updates are, there's no way I can search for all of these in less than an hour and obtain information that I would find useful. The news-updates maybe, but all the extra stuff along the way I find like "where to get the best deals on chicken this week" and "ooh, an Estate Sale this Saturday in up-scale Palos Verdes, maybe I'll find a nice piece of furniture there for cheap"? No, I don't think I can search or Google all those in the same time frame that I can going through the Sunday paper.