Perhaps what was most impressive about the eReader he clutched in his ham-like fist wasn’t how thin and light the device was. Nor that it had a beautiful “skin” or cover on it. What was impressive was how this device had turned this 55 year old man into a raging advocate for his Kindle. I honestly felt I was sitting next to a born-again [pick your religion]. In fact, you could have labelled this guy a born again reader.

David Warlick (2cents blog) shares in this entry that Rumors of ‘It’s’ Demises are Greatly Exaggerated. He says:

Do I think books are dead? Yes, absolutely print books are dead. But, I hope that for every book reader who dies, a born again eReader will escape the eschatological cave and embrace the resurrection of stories available in digital format.

One recent born again is my daughter. Her room is an oasis of orismology, where intellectual refreshment pools on bookshelves, spilling over onto the floor in stacks of paperbacks, research tomes whose true value is as keys to hooked on one’s shoulder, granting access to knowledge in the future. She promised to remain faithful to the print books, but when presented with her own Aluratek Libre eReader, her faithfulness to the form of the ideas, the stories she treasures, and the tomes of theory was transfigured.

More importantly–if such a thing is possible for an avid reader–is the opportunities being able to publish content in digital formats that are easily accessible and marketable (consider the story of John Locke, the author who published a million copies of his book via Amazon).

E-books currently make up around 11 percent of the total book market. The percentage of print book consumers who say they download e-books more than doubled between October 2010 and January 2011—from 5 percent to almost 13 percent. (Source: Paid Content via MindDump)

Have you given yourself the opportunity to be transformed by new media, old stories like aged wine in a fresh wineskin?

Wait, wait…putting new wine into old wineskins is problematic, isn’t it? Wouldn’t the converse be true? Well, not necessarily. Digital formats DO offer a lot of flexibility as my daughter, the person at the top of this blog entry and I have discovered. But there ARE problems. These are elaborated on quite well by Richard Stallman on ebooks:

In an age where business dominates our governments and writes our laws, every technological advance offers business an opportunity to impose new restrictions on the public. Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead…Ebooks need not attack our freedom, but they will if companies get to decide. It’s up to us to stop them. The fight has already started.