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Here are the two most important things to know about computers
and the Internet:

1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits

2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to
another very cheaply and quickly

Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers
will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press
is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at
speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you’ll get
junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you’ll get the
basis for a free society.

And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record
execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that
Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s
with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll
listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
actors out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what
the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
aloud from your personal Word of God.