Mandy Brown on the future of the book:

That age has ended. We are now ushering in a new age of books which exist without any physical presence at all, which can be transmitted across oceans in moments, in which annotations and criticisms can be shared in ways no one of the seventeenth century could ever have imagined. (Indeed, ways we of the twenty-first century are only beginning to understand.) And yet we still stubbornly refer to them as “books,” tucking but a sly vowel up front (“ebook”), as if we’re afraid to really admit how much has changed. This naming convention is no less absurd than if the codex was called a “folded scroll” or the scroll a “soft, thin, rolled tablet.” Dramatic changes in form require equally dramatic changes in terms.

Amen to that. I feel this absurdity whenever I describe Linebreak as an “online journal,” when it isn’t a journal at all — it’s a web site that publishes the text and audio of one new poem each week. Phrases like “online journal” and “online magazine” persist only because we have yet to acknowledge the fundamental change that occurs when an online publication stops imitating paper publications in even a modest way.