When I read this article–“Why I Dropped eBooks“–I didn’t feel older than before I read it, just something like amused. I would have called it “Why I Never Adopted eBooks.” It’s someone discovering that, by gum, non-virtual books are pretty cool.

I am, regardless, alarmed that a regular e-book reader can take a long while to figure out the most remarkable coup of the publishing (and recording) world: you don’t own an e-book most of the time, you own the right to read it, and that only on one particular platform. Yet you pay nearly as much as you would for an actual book. It’s an awful lot like a library, only you always have to pay fines.

I can see a use for e-books, though. Hauling physical books around with you can be mighty tiresome in the quantities most people I know truck with.

Anyway–here’s hoping, as my friend Robert V.S. Redick said, this is an “early voice in the coming pro-paper, anti-ebook revival.”