The haters can shove it. To my mind, THE DA VINCI CODE was a perfectly decent thriller. No more, no less... I have read three different New York newspapers this morning, and all three have prominent articles on the impending publication of THE LOST SECRET. These articles are not buried in the middle of the paper, but are printed within the first eight or so pages (right up there with tawdry wedding scandals and mockery of David Patterson--you know, the important stuff). The publication of this book is a bona fide event. When was the last time a book for adults was an actual event? Sure Grisham and Patterson sell books by the truckload, but their release dates are hardly the kind of thing you call your friends to talk about.

Seriously, folks, the future of books is being decided now, much like it was being decided for newspapers 5-7 years ago. I’m not at all bashing e-books... But, there are some extremely important questions involving books and technology these days which -- left unheeded -- are defaulting in a direction which may not be the world of books we want to live in. And, most of these are things that you as a citizen/taxpayer/person-who-cares can take action on now. Let us learn from history, and not be like the newspaper industry and simply Do Nothing.

I have mixed feelings about Jonathan Karp's recent article for Publishers Weekly, in which he laid out his "12 Steps to Better Book Publishing." On the one hand, I imagine they would make publishing more consistently successful and profitable. On the other, the only way they'd do that would be through unfeasible collusion in restraint of trade, losses of the jobs of at least half of the people currently working in book publishing, and publication schedules that resemble Karp's own Twelve imprint (one guaranteed big-seller a month and nothing else). Since I enjoy both reading books outside that narrow framework and a publishing ecosystem with jobs for myself and my friends, it's not a model I can entirely agree with.

By this same astute reasoning, Stevens has proved that Walt Whitman, a poor carpenter’s son who left school at eleven, never wrote Whitman, while Stevens’s colleague (and fellow Shakespeare doubter) Antonin Scalia, educated at a Queens public school, never became a Supreme Court Justice.

Don’t serious readers (defined as anyone who reads more than simply the “must-read” book of the year) already drop one book for another in mid-chapter if boredom or burning curiosity take hold? Can’t we already satisfy our craving for (near) instant gratification by ordering online or picking up the phone? Isn’t the point (conscious or not) of collecting your books in one place, of hanging onto everything you’ve ever read (even those ancient college textbooks you have in a box in the attic) and creating elaborate (or not so-) systems of organizing your books intended to facilitate that exact skipping from one text to another, the hunting down of obscure references, the application of a palate-cleansing chaser of short fiction to wash the taste of a badly written biography away? In short, don’t we already mix and remix our reading in exactly the way that Johnson seems to think ereaders newly facilitate?