ur name wrong!).

5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace
their nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthagonal to
the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability
and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an
ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you
restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an
ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a
paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes. Ebooks don't beat
paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them
for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try
sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less
than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little
stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a
paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a
beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a
paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.

6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter
one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a
shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their
audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find
cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle
with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and
action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be
a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our
penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas
without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow
chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of
shortened attention spans as a product of the information age,
but check this out:

[Nietzsche quote]

> To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to
> practice reading as an *art* in this way, something
> needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.

In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not
paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but
this quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote
with attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy
of Morals," published in *1887.*

Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't
necessarily *shorter*. Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the
storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds
for *f