So while the computer can now send and store information like never before, it still stinks for reading. Studies show that reading off a screen is 25 percent slower than off a printed page, Nielsen said. Which leaves the electronic books competing on the grounds that, pound for pound, they can store more books or documents. Nielsen sees the electronic book hitting its stride in five or 10 years. But the Web's connectivity is its least booklike aspect.
Books are static, while the Web can be everchanging.
They don't call it new media for nothing. Thomas Edison made that mistake, he said, when he made movies by filming plays from a static camera angle. Then his cameraman, Edwin S. Porter, started using close-ups, editing and dissolve techniques. By the same token, Leo Baekeland misguidedly tried to make plastic look like wood and tortoise shell before appreciating the material's own aesthetic qualities, said Saffo. But for now, let Michael Wolff have the last word in the debate.