“I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book – even if it does so numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a “smell” function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox marks and nicotine).”
— Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile | Books | The Guardian
