Two big pieces of digital publishing news this week: first, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire – the ‘iPad killer’. Then yesterday, the launch of Bloomsbury Reader: a new digital imprint resurrecting hundreds of out-of-print titles by HRF Keating, Storm Jameson, VS Pritchett and other writers that used to be famous.
It has never been a better time to be a reader. Why then is there still an underlying suspicion of digital publishing? You can understand the wariness from some in the book trade, which was late to digital and is now terrified of getting a raw deal.
What I don’t get is the facetious luddism of the anti-ereader brigade, whose arguments range from the boringly practical (‘you can’t read a Kindle in the bath/in the sun /on a bicycle’) to the faintly fetishistic (‘nothing can replace the earthy smell, the velvety touch…’).
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