"Her Serene Highness" writes:

Are you honestly saying that every book you will ever want to read is on a computer? 

Why are you so violent about this? Why can't you understand that no one here is planning on torching the libraries, that ebooks and paper books aren't exclusive?

You must think I'm mad to love a physical book that I will pass down to some relative of mine,

Why do you assume that?

My computer was not on the list.

And neither were most of your books. Your books are, of course, naturally inferior. Under even moderate enviromental conditions, they will fade away in a hundred years, a few hundred years at the best. Even in libraries they yellow and fade. They don't have the right smell, they don't feel right in the hand. That's why they will never supersede stone tablets.

It's available in modern English in book form. 

It's available in modern English in ebook form, too. The original text is also available in ebook form, both from Project Gutenberg.

...

You can't understand Shakespeare until you read him in the original Klingon.

You can- if you're educated. 

Bah! The poorly translated English versions are but mere shadows of the originals in the Warrior's Tongue! Your human biased education merely blinds you to that fact!

Maybe if you stopped reading Star Trk novels as literature, you'd realize you read Shakespeare's language pretty much every day.

Perhaps if you started reading Star Trek novels, you would realize that reading doesn't have to be serious, and that our dreams aren't circumscribed by the concepts of the Elizabetheans and Victorians, that there is a wonderful future ahead of us, but it may require letting go of our death-grip on the things of the past. We may have a home on the moon or Mars sometime in the near future, but if we do, the library will be composed of ebooks, not paper books. In a world where every pound costs hundreds or thousands of dollars to move, ebooks are a godsend. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm