Dibs

According to news reports today, Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library are teaming up to make 300,000 e-books — electronic digitized texts that you read on your computer screen instead of curled up on the couch — available for free between July 4 and August 4. That’s a lot of reading material to squeeze into one month. But it raises a larger question: whatever became of the “e-book revolution,” once touted as the nemesis of the book publishing industry, which would soon be driven to extinction? If anything, the 300,000 free e-book bonanza seems less like a harbinger of Things to Come and more like a Desperate Ploy for Attention. Despite the dire prognostications during the dot-com boom, the book industry is still surging ahead full-steam. People still buy books, and they’ve shown with their wallets that they’d rather read them in bed or on a commuter train than hunched over a desk while squinting at a screen. E-books may find a niche market within the overall book publishing industry, but for the foreseeable future, the Age of Paperbacks has no end in sight.