I've had a few e-mails from folks asking me why I have not reported on the Amazon Kindle yet. As one who was once labeled the "E-Book Evangelist," certainly I would have an opinion on this one. Frankly, I almost don't know what to say, and the usual 3-day fermentation period that is my writing style, which usually results in a zippy 250-word blog post, just was not coming.

One of the phrases that I used to use about e-books is "the second mouse always gets the cheese." I thought that for sure early failures in e-book devices would lead to the perfect handheld device, software that made digital reading a pleasure, and a DRM acceptable to most libraries—or at least their patrons. I sincerely thought that by now we would have a device that smelled like a paperback, and we still don't have anything that even feels like one. Since the early days of digital books, many a rodent has died upon the altar of the e-book mousetrap. The cheese itself (digitized content, in this painful metaphor) has aged gracefully and gotten bigger. But the perfect device, the perfect software, still eludes us.

That said, I don't want to dwell on the Kindle itself. There are plenty (plenty, plenty) of blogs, reviews, and even videos mostly deriding Kindle's ability to not be more like an iPod. I'm not going to criticize its look and feel because $400 is above my technical curiosity threshold. Really, Amazon, did you think that making me choose between this oddly colored (is that 1993 PC beige?) e-book device and a Sony Blu-Ray was giving me any choice at all? Though I don't have one in hand, my biggest disappointment is that the pictures I have seen make it look a bit too much like the grainy snapshot that was available when I did blog about Kindle over a year ago.

I do not find disparity between belief in the power of the printed word and the power of the word digitized. I have said all along that an e-book is not a device, it is not a piece of software—it is the work in electronic form. How a publisher chooses to distribute that work, and how a person chooses to consume it is where the disparity begins. —Your's truly, Computers in Libraries, May 2005

So we're still down to distribution and consumption being the biggest barriers. These are the topics being debated in the circles of Google Books and the OCA. And now Amazon has distracted us with their new little device. I really only want to see one for the supposed wonder that is the e-ink display. As I have been cleaning out my office, I came across my old RocketBook and SoftBook. I still like them both as devices, but due to technological and content restrictions (and some financial mismanagement), they were doomed to failure.

So maybe we need to take another step back. The Kindle is just another device, like the iPod, and the Palm, like the RocketBook. Tastes for consumption are hard to predict, but content providers can put themselves in the stream regardless. I grow increasingly pessimistic about a publisher's ability to put itself in that stream without hyperbolic DRM paranoia.

The e-book scene is so different than it was when I first got involved, yet the arguments for and against seem to be getting circular in nature. What exactly will get us out of this circle, out of this e-book malaise, I do not know.

My wife and I just decided that we would rather live without heat than air conditioning. We decided this after living for four days without it, during the hottest week of the year in Raleigh. A mixture of bad luck and some repairman incompetence made for a very long weekend.

I remember when I first started at NC State, I jokingly asked one of the older staff why everyone in N.C. walked so slow. She replied—quite wisely—that you can separate North Carolinians into two camps: those who lived here before air conditioning and those who moved here after it became pervasive. "If you had moved that fast back then, you would have been dead by 3 p.m.," she quipped. "Of course, you would have been wearing a jacket and tie, too," she added with a wink and a sideways glance at my attire.

All that heat made people slow down. I wonder if that is what is happening to libraries. There's so much going on that we are actually slowing down in hopes of surviving the heat. Google books, RDA, ILS industry shake-ups, new catalogs, 2.0. I think I'll just grab a seat on that bench over there in the shade.

I think we need to change our state of mind a little. Instead of thinking of folks like Google making it too hot, think of them as air conditioning. We don't need them to survive, but they make things more comfortable. They change the pace of life.

Google won't say, but the Economist estimates that it could be scanning 10M books per year. Numbers I heard from the Library of Congress a couple of weeks ago reported 350,000 items cataloged last year. I'll let y'all do some comparative math on that one.

Open Library launched a little while ago. Brewster Kahle's crew wants to digitize and describe all the books. They're snarfing up as many catalog records as they can. This is an interesting cooperative project that is essentially challenging both OCLC and Google. Is this a problem for libraries or an opportunity? Should we be preparing to ship all pre-1923 titles off to remote storage and compact shelving so that we can figure out what to do with the rest of the collections?

Amazon and Kirtas have teamed up with Emory and the University of Maine to cool things off as well. Get ready for more print on demand. Is this an area that libraries would want to wade into on their own? Now, if we can only travel the last hot mile of the e-book journey by convincing publishers that e-books are air conditioning, not more heat (we also need to convince them to make more public roads and less private and exclusive tollways).

When I related the story of my weekend and the sentiment about living without A/C to a complete stranger yesterday, he replied, "Funny thing is you need heat to survive, not air conditioning." We like heat, we need heat, but for now, I'm pretty happy with all the air conditioning.

I've always had a hard time explaining my position on e-books. Some of my esteemed colleagues are quick to point out the minor dent that e-books have made in overall book sales in this country and others. But when I started evangelizing about e-books back in the late 1990s, we were still talking about what I call the "curl-up factor." I grew so tired of hearing people complain about not wanting to curl up with an e-book, or the inability to take an e-book to the beach, that as soon as I read either phrase in e-book commentary, I simply stopped. [WARNING: rhetorical question ahead. No need to flood comments.] How many laptop owners can say they've never curled up with theirs in bed, and who hasn't seen a Blackberry at the beach?

The interesting thing to me is that much of the debate about whether to do e-books ended when Google made its now-famous announcement. "Whether or not" to digitize became "how, which, and whose books" nearly overnight. I still find it ironic that despite publishers and middleware providers' valiant efforts to digitize books, it took a press release about Google digitizing millions of books for which it had no rights to turn the tide of e-book production.

There are a couple of interesting new things out there. First, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is announcing a conference in New York City for May 9, 2007. Digital Book 2007 will feature digital publishing and mobile device innovations. Librarians might remember the IDPF as the OeBF, or Open eBook Forum. It dropped the old moniker when it became clear that the group was essentially a trade organization, and not primarily an effort to create an open e-book standard—a goal that I still believe was thwarted by the conflict of interest of some of its participants in maintaining the strong footing of proprietary technology in the e-books market space. Anyway, the conference will likely include a better look at e-ink technologies, Adobe's new Flash-based e-book reader, and more.

The conference's confirmed speaker list includes the Digital Library Federation's new executive director, Peter Brantley. Brantley recently shook up the e-book world a little with a Google e-book apologia related to recent library dealings with the Google Books project. The original post is a poetic read; its follow-up, "Reprise with Clarity," is also excellent.

Back to my position on e-books. It's not a "more digital books" position, but what I like to call "books more digital." That is, the more digital the book is, the more options publishers, libraries, patrons, and shoppers will have for consuming them and building services upon them. Whether e-ink, cell-phone, or print-on-demand paperback, a more digital book is a more readable book. Now that the "whether or not" debate is coming to an end, it may be time (or it may be too late) for libraries to reinvest their time in investigating standards, pressuring publishers to release content for digitization, and playing with the technology that will soon be (or already is) in the hands of our patrons.

I did something really radical for Children's Book Week this year--I read a book to a group of children! It was my second time being invited to Olds Elementary in Raleigh, and with no offense to my Libraryland colleagues, it was once again one of the most rewarding speaking engagements of my career.

I think I have even hit upon a recipe for success for talking to the kids in Mrs. Gordon's media center (I still wish they would call it a library). I talk about being a writer, about being a reader. I tell them that if you can read, you can do anything. I ask how many of them think being a librarian would be pretty cool, and a few hands even go up.

I bring a bag of tricks with me, and I announce that in that bag I have over 160,000 books. One bright kid even called out "Your laptop is in there!" He got me. But before I get to the e-books, I tell them about the history of books. I even pass around a 1792 copy of Plea's Heard Before the King's Bench. Most of the old books these kids have seen are behind glass or locked in cases. I want them to smell the vellum cover and hold the pages up to the light to see the watermarks and lines from the paper-making process.

I tell the story that James Burke told me as a kid when I watched PBS Connections--how the mass production of underwear (and thus the ragman profession and plentiful supplies of used cotton) led to the mass production of books and the spread of reading by the masses throughout Europe and Asia. One only need say the word "underwear" to get huge laughs from third-graders.

Then I read them one of my favorite children's books. Thank You, Mr. Falker, by Patricia Polacco. In it, a dedicated teacher helps a girl with dyslexia discover the joy of reading that her grandparents described to her. Like a bee chases honey, so the reader chases knowledge through a book. I was floored by the utter silence in the room as I read. They were actually engrossed after a rather rambunctious start to the afternoon.

Then I pull out my tablet PC and talk about e-books and audiobooks, and the wealth of knowledge that lies at their fingertips. I admit that I do it for the wow factor...they love the tablet. They stared intently at the multimedia and sat as quiet as church mice to hear the "Learning Japanese" audiobook--just as they had for the print book.

I put away my tricks and ask them again how many think it would be cool to be a librarian. Now most of the hands go up. I ask them again what happens if they can read. "You can do anything!" comes the enthusiastic response. I believe it.