Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

Fascinating article in the Book Review about the implication of the migration of books to digital form on browsing. It is part of the growing realization that one of the profound casualties of the digital form is the disruption of visual and tactile free association. Think of staring at a wall in your local video store, thumbing through record bins, or in this case flipping through a book or magazine. Digital media is frantically constructing gizmos meant to mimic these dynamics - recommended links, bookmarking, etc… but none yet come close to the same degree of effectiveness. Further proof that in many ways, the past was faster…