by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner
for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer
alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup,
since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure
to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the
incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright
laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital
Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.

Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who
thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the
duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and
newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement
that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an
unlawful copyright infringement -- something more usually left up
to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from
esteemed copyright scholars [WIND DONE GONE GRAPHIC].

This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my
boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression,
not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the
First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the
rest of the world.

Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook
stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the
other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks
every day.

This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:

1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
[GRAPHIC]

2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day
[GRAPHIC]

These two certainties begged a lot of questions.

[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]

* Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper

* People want to own physical books because of their visceral
appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how
good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how
evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be)

* You can't take your ebook into the tub

* You can't read an ebook without power and a computer

* File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time

None of these seemed like very good explanations for the
"failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to
replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time
reading off a