Everyone agrees that the technology we know as the e-book has and will change the way we read. In addition to the traditional hard copies of books, magazines, periodicals, and collections, we enjoy the option of reading the content of those entities on computer screens and on e-readers and even on cell phones. This makes accessibility and the speed of accessibility much greater. As soon as we come upon a mention of a book or article, we can link on the hypertext that is usually provided and come upon a way to scan or download the material. We can easily interrupt what we are reading and move to something new. We can easily annotate or bolster our writing or research with the work of others. We can explore a new author or genre on a whim. We can and, more and more, we do.

Steven Johnson wrote a very interesting article that appeared recently in the "Wall Street Journal" titled "How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write". The paper describes the article as outlining "a future with more books, more distractions – and the end of reading alone." Johnson relives an "aha" moment when he was in a restaurant reading a business book on his e-reader and got a sudden urge to read a novel. He searched on his Kindle, downloaded Sadie Smith's novel "On Beauty" and had the first chapter finished by the time his check arrived. Without leaving the table in the restaurant, he had acted on his urge to read and novel, and he read it in public. All this goes to demonstrate the obvious changes in how we read.

I think equally of value for authors is to focus on the implications of how we read on how we should write. With Amazon and Google Book Search and others making snippets and excerpts, even pages and chapters, available to prospective readers and buyers, authors must think about the fact that readers will have access to these discrete portions of their writing before having purchased their work. Johnson discusses this change as well and notes that an Introduction or other parts of front matter are now similar to cover or jacket copy in that they must provide an enticement to purchase. Previously authors thought of prefatory materials as being read after a reader had committed to a book. Now they will be read prior to purchase and will serve more than one purposeSimilarly authors will have to think about how a page or excerpt by itself will impact a reader's decision-making – and even how a chapter of page will stand alone. If we now offer excerpts of chapters free for download, how far behind will be offering excerpts and chapters for purchase? A reader might buy just a chapter or two of a novel before committing to buying the entire novel. A researcher might need only a page or paragraph from a scientific or other non-fiction work rather than the entire work. Just as iTunes allows purchasers to buy a song from an album, online retailers may allow readers to buy a page or a chapter. All of this will need to be taken into consideration by authors as the future of publishing unfolds.