will be colleges because of the many
advantages for students (ability to download all their reading
for the entire semester, inexpensiveness, linking into exams,
assignments, need for portability, eliminating need to lug
books all over)."

Eduard Hovy is the head of the Natural Language Group at
USC/ISI (University of Southern California / Information
Sciences Institute). He wrote in September 2000: "eBooks, to
me, are a non-starter. More even that seeing a concert live or
a film at a cinema, I like the physical experience holding a
book in my lap and enjoying its smell and feel and heft.
Concerts on TV, films on TV, and ebooks lose some of the
experience; and with books particularly it is a loss I do not
want to accept. After all, it is much easier and cheaper to get
a book in my own purview than a concert or cinema. So I wish
the ebook makers well, but I am happy with paper. And I don't
think I will end up in the minority anytime soon - I am much
less afraid of books vanishing than I once was of cinemas
vanishing."

Tim McKenna is an author who thinks and writes about the
complexity of truth in a world of flux. He wrote in October
2000: "I don't think that they have the right appeal for lovers
of books. The internet is great for information. Books are not
information. People who love books have a relationship with
their books. They re-read them, write in them, confer with
them. Just as cybersex will never replace the love of a woman,
ebooks will never be a vehicle for beautiful prose."

Steven Krauwer is the coordinator of ELSNET (European Network
of Excellence in Human Language Technologies). He wrote in June
2001 that "ebooks still had a long way to go before reading
from a screen feels as comfortable as reading a book."

Guy Antoine is the founder of Windows on Haiti, a reference
website about Haitian culture. He wrote in June 2001: "Sorry, I
haven't tried them yet. Perhaps because of this, it still
appears to me like a very odd concept, something that the
technology made possible, but for which there will not be any
wide usage, except perhaps for classic reference texts. High
school and college textbooks could be a useful application of
the technology, in that there would be much lighter backpacks
to carry. But for the sheer pleasure of reading, I can hardly
imagine getting cozy with a good ebook."

= PDAs

In the 1990s, Jacques Gauchey was a journalist and writer
covering information technology in S