How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com

Un article essentiel sur cette nouvelle révolution, dont on parle depuis longtemps, mais qui est maintenant à nos portes. (JMR)


"Author Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone


By STEVEN JOHNSON

Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of 'aha' moment in your memory -- the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.
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I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.

The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel 'On Beauty.' By the time the check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter."