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Tim O’Reilly, “Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web,”
OReilly
Radar
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April
29,
2009,
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/reinventing- the-book-age-of-web.html
.
[197]
Motoko Rich, “Curling Up with Hybrid Books, Videos Included,”
New York Times, September 30, 2009.
[198]
Johnson, “How the E-Book Will Change.”
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Andrew Richard Albanese, “Q&A.: The Social Life of Books,”
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[200]
Kevin Kelly, “Scan this Book!” New York Times Magazine, May
14, 2006.
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Caleb Crain, “How Is the Internet Changing Literary Style?,”
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June
17,
2008,
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[202]
Some Kindle owners received a startling lesson in the ephemerality
of digital text when, on the morning of July 17, 2009, they awoke to find that
the e-book versions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm they had
purchased from Amazon.com had disappeared from their devices. It turned
out that Amazon had erased the books from customers’ Kindles after
discovering that the editions were unauthorized.
[203]
Up to now, concerns about the influence of digital media on
language have centered on the abbreviations and emoticons that kids use in
instant messaging and texting. But such affectations will probably prove
benign, just the latest twist in the long history of slang. Adults would be
wiser to pay attention to how their own facility with writing is changing. Is
their vocabulary shrinking or becoming more hackneyed? Is their
syntaxbecoming less flexible and more formulaic? Those are the types of
questions that matter in judging the Net’s long-run effects on the range and
expressiveness of language.
