digital Montaigne will arrive very soon

At if:book, there is a thoughtful article by Sebastian Mary on reading and paper, and why the iPod for reading high quality Web content really should be only a moment away.

I read books, read blogs, I twitter compulsively. I use these different formats for different kinds of experience. I see no contradiction: what I'm getting at here is that the e-reader is being treated as though it is a viable vehicle for long-form writing, in a way that ignores the essential fact that long-form writing and reading is rooted in paper, and book manufacturing...

...I would welcome a device designed for downloading and archiving essays I think are important, a virtual library device for the belles lettres of today.

Armed with such a device, creating playlists, mashups, collages of our favourite short works, we might become a generation of digital Montaignes, annotating and expanding our collective discourse. Blogging is already, in effect, the re-emergence of belles lettres; and while blog posts are typically written for the moment, a device that could earn the blogger a small sum (and the cachet of being considered worthy of archiving) for every essay downloaded might well inspire a renaissance in short work written for a longer lifespan.

While I get a small headache thinking about the business model for that, he has noted that it already exists and is called iTunes.
So, why not have a bookshelf AND an e-reader, hey.

The first commenter on this post is a guy called Aaron Pressman who refers us to an online service called Instapaper - he blogged it here.

Note also that the Australian e-reader, the iLiad, available through Dymocks (no, I'm not being sponsored to say that), allows annotation.

Time for a shower - I'll leave it to you to embrace the rest of the discussion there, but note that Bob Stein, the founder of The Institute for the Future of the Book (where the if:book blog lives), is speaking in Brisbane this week. I am making inquiries and will let you know if he is coming south at all. (News of that event via Angela at LiteraryMinded.)