Guardian Unlimited | Online | Bobbie Johnson: The web and the art of reading:

“A decade ago, when the internet bandwagon started to roll, the sense of fear from inside the literary establishment was palpable. With each new technological development, sinister soothsayers would trot out the latest in a series of dark predictions. Ebooks, we were told, would herald the death of paper-based novels. Websites such as Amazon would destroy bookselling as we knew it. The escalating volume of informal, sporadic email would degrade literacy and reduce readers’ attention spans.More than a decade into the wired world, however, few of these sinister prophecies have come to pass. In fact, there are more and more writers taking the opposite view: that the web is actually a valuable ally to the literary world.”