“
*They’re not dead yet, but they serve no technical function, other than the skeuomorphic legal and financial pretense that e-books are “books,” and therefore somehow different from all other digital files.
*It’s sorta like the “Wall Street Journal” still pretending that the Wall Street Journal is whatever it thinks it is this week.
*I hope all those dedicated e-reader “books” are somehow able to squirm out of the sarcophagus of their formatting and copy protection, because otherwise we will presently see the largest “book” holocaust of all time, at least in terms of the numbers of individual copies.
”
- Bruce Sterling on ebooks