“Good books need real pages. Stiff paper. Handleable emotions. Only indifferent books can make do with mere electronics, tempting a culture that in turn tempts piracy or plagiarism or deliberate torrenting towards vanishing waterfalls of forgetting….”
That is what I have just discovered I wrote here in 2011.
Last Balcony: Essex Serpents and Pier’s Echo 
This is one I have to reply to. Now.
Partly I know that the main issue here is that people continue to write and to read. Whether they do this by texting with mobile phones, using iPads, emails, letters, writing with keyboards or fountain pens, chalk or other digital media – whether books are ebooks or leather-bound tomes with hand-cut pages – the main thing is to continue to communicate and to do so creatively.
But “… tempting a culture that in turn tempts piracy or plagiarism or deliberate torrenting towards vanishing waterfalls of forgetting….” This is so frightening. The mutation of the language is inevitable, as inevitable as the changing ways of recording that language. Working in a college as I do I see daily evidence of young – and not-so-young people – and teachers! – who don’t know where to place a full stop leave alone an apostrophe. And god help some of them who need to spell ‘apostrophe’! In my other life at the college I clean toilets.
But happily it allows me to finance a small stand again what C M Kornbluth described in his novella The Marching Morons way back in 1951, even if it’s only by publishing a small-press magazine.
Now who’s being pretentious, Des? 🙂
Rog, That’s an interpretation of my ‘torrents of forgetting’ that I had not intended. But it is a good one.
I was thinking of the torrents (literally as well as technically) of pirated and unpirated ebooks, millions of them, some illiterate, some brilliant, some in between, that lead to us forgetting them all!
And I discovered my one and only novel torrented illegally on some pirate sites very recently.
I was struck, when I stumbled upon it earlier today, at what I had written above in 2011.