When you stand inside somebody's library, you get a powerful sense of who they are, and not just who they are now but who they've been. . . . It's a wonderful thing to have in a house. It's something I worry is endangered by the rise of the e-book. When you turn off an e-book, there's no map. All that's left behind is a chunk of gray plastic. ~ Lev Grossman
Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
RE: Kindle, iPad, et cetera: For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary. I thing it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, author of Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics.