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  3. Amazon, corn’s recent announcement that sales of e-books at the online megastore had overtaken sales of hardcover books came as

Amazon, corn’s recent announcement that sales of e-books at the online megastore had overtaken sales of hardcover books came as

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问题     Amazon, corn’s recent announcement that sales of e-books at the online megastore had overtaken sales of hardcover books came as no surprise. It had to happen sometime. But the news did evoke quite an interesting mental image: libraries that from now on will look smaller and less crowded.
    For the moment, let’s not argue with the proposition that people will read as much as they ever have. The habits of readers may not change. But if readers aren’t changing, their environments will. Rooms that once held books will—well, whatever they hold from now on, it won’t be books. Or not as many books. Theoretically, your space will be more spare, less disordered. That’s the theory, at least.
    All of this has already happened big time in the music business, where downloads have gradually but surely replaced CDs. All those CDs taking tip space on the wall—gone. From now on, we’ll own what might be described as the idea of stuff, since the actual physical things—records, tapes, photographs, CDs, and now books—have been as good as vaporized, with the information contained therein stored away on a hard drive.
    This, of course, is merely subordinate damage in the digital revolution, if damage it is. There’s as yet no way to tell if this transition is good, bad, both, or neither, but surely the absence of a physical library, be it musical or literary, marks a fundamental shift in the way we live and think about things. In music, for example, the rise of iTunes, YouTube, and all the other online music suppliers has quickly eroded our devotion to the long-playing album as the principal means of organizing music.
    With books, the absence of packaging does nothing to the contents. I can buy a hardcover copy of "Moby-Dick" or download it onto an e-reader, and Melville is still Melville. But I grew up loving Rockwell Kent’s illustrations of that novel, and later Barry Moser’s. It’s hard to think of the book without them. I can do that, certainly, but some little thing is lost.
    For years audiophiles (唱片爱好者) have tried to persuade more casual music fans that a vinyl record (黑胶唱片) played on a decent sound system sounds better than a digital recording played on the same system. Digital sound is not as warm, not as seductive to the ear. Something of the same argument might be made for books, or for the tactile (触觉的) pleasure of holding and reading a well-made book. At its simplest, a book is a tool, or an information-delivery system. To conceive of a world without physical books is to conceive of a world somehow diminished. It may be more efficient—yes, you can take a "stack" of books on vacation with an e-reader. But efficiency is no substitute for pleasure. The future may be less disordered. It may also be less fun.
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