Impulse

I love books. No, nothing so abstract as to include a PDF. I'm talking about a good old fashioned hunk of pressed wood I can hold in my hand, thumb through, or drop on the table with a satisfying thud.

I've tried the ebook thing. I attempted reading Alice in Wonderland on a Palm, but never got very far. The same was true of Cory Doctorow's online books which I tried both via PDF and via the new daily RSS feed. I just can't get into them. Online, I have an attention span of about 5 paragraphs. After that, the text becomes dry and sterile, no matter how good the writing (and Cory's writing is quite good). It's just not as good as a hard-copy.
It's not the medium, but what you can do with it: You can curl up on the couch with a book. You can read in bed for hours without getting entangled in power cords. You can read them sitting upside-down on a big poofy chair (yes, I still do this even though it's been several decades since I was 10). The last time I tried that with an ebook, my arms got so sore preventing the laptop from crashing down on my head that I couldn't type for days.
Little bitty devices like Palms & cell phones are no help - how can you cheat & read ahead in a suspenseful scene (admit it, you do it too) when the screen only holds two sentences? Don't even try to read a screenplay on one of these - the reformatting will leave you lost in a desert of whitespace with oases of dialog.
There are, however, disadvantages to the wood pulp format: they're bloody heavy - I had to pay €80 extra to return from a two month tour of europe because I had amassed 18 books in my luggage. More frustratingly, books are completely unsearchable. I have been completely spoiled by google & grep: I expect my search results in seconds. Thumbing through pages in a book, searching for a phrase is now intolerable. If I can't find a phrase in a few seconds, I get so frustrated that I want to throw the book at something (another satisfying advantage of that medium, btw). I've actually caught myself flipping through a book wondering where they put the search-box.
I want the books of Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age - a book that looks like a book, feels like a book, smells like a book, but can download new content and is completely searchable.
Enough commentary for now. Tune in tomorrow for another installment of Cool Art. After that, the post I intended to write tonight, assuming I can find that bloody Terry Gilliam quote I just spent hours searching for. (Ok, it was only one minute, but it seemed like hours).