In Celebration of Books

Beginning of article

The doomsayers have been predicting for quite some time that the ever-increasing use of electronic resources will doom the book to obsolescence. Their pessimistic views of the future either had everyone sitting in front of flickering computer screens reading plain ASCII text or refusing to read at all, preferring instead to be entertained by multimedia extravaganzas. In their future, the art of typography would be lost forever, as would the simple pleasure of opening a new book and inhaling the "new book smell."

I would never presume to predict the future, but I do observe the present, and in the online circles through which I move, I observe that books are being advertised, …