A fellow blogger points out, correctly, that when we read online we tend to pick out short articles. I browse through dozens of one-pagers a day and do hesitate a little with multiple-pagers.

The question here is: will e-books, with their pages numbered in hundreds and words in thousands, catch the attentions of people who read online habitually and frequently, thereby justifying their digital existence? The easy answer is: if the book is good, people will read it, no matter what the format is. I know; that’s a sloppy, no-answer answer.

For me, e-book is an extra choice with the side benefit of saving some trees. Paper copies of books will never go away. A keen observer of this “blog phenomenon” is likely to notice that there is a generation of youngsters who literally “live” online and whose eyes have more contacts with written words on computer screens than on paper copies, and that is a group of future customers the publishing industry cannot ignore.

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