If I was interested in getting hold of a book, it still wouldn't immediately occur to me to try and look for it online. I'm more likely to go to Amazon or Abebooks, search for it, buy it, and wait 10 days for it to drop on my doormat. Music, TV and radio shows, films, software will happily whizz down my broadband pipe, but any document that's longer than 9 or 10 pages that arrives in my Downloads folder still seems to be in the wrong format, and should really be printed out and stapled in the top left hand corner. Which probably represents a minor ecological catastrophe, but there you go. Long chunks of text still feel as if they're meant to be read while sprawled on my front on the floor, or while sat in a deckchair on the beach, but usually the former, what with me living in London and all.( Read more... )

*

In an unrelated footnote, according to Gender Analyzer, this blog is 84% likely to be written by a woman. The Independent is written by a man, but The Times is written by a woman. I think they need to tweak their algorithms.