Run a test. Give

Run a test. Give a 5-year-old a printed book and an iPad and see what happens. That 5-year-old is going to go right for the iPad. They’re not intimidated by it. They know what to do with it. They’ll start searching around. And in a children’s e-book, you can have links to kid-safe encyclopedia. So … Read more

The good news (for

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize … Read more

Some day, as soon

Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank … Read more

Nowadays when a poet

Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one … Read more