This is not a diatribe against e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle is the #1 bestseller on Amazon, for reasons that are not all bad. But technology comes with a downside. The advantages of technology are shouted at you from the package. The bad you may discover only through experience. To bring some balance to our thinking about e-book readers, here is a list of books that will never be on the Kindle.
The Twelve Days of Christmas by Robert Sabuda. This pop-up book contains some of the best and most artistic paper engineering around.
The Sea by Philip Plisson. This 11×14 coffee table photography book has fold-out panoramas that are 44 x14 inches.
Penguin (Zooflipz) by Jody-Grant Gray. Flip the pages for a “you control the speed” animation.
Animals (Baby Touch and Feel) by DK Publishing has fur that you can touch.
Mark Twain: Five Novels, the leather bound edition by Canterbury Classics. Twain is on the Kindle but they haven’t released the leather-bound edition yet.
Voyage of the Dawn Treader first edition, autographed by C.S. Lewis. This would only cost you $100 unsigned, but with the autograph it is worth perhaps $20,000. You can’t get the Kindle version autographed at any price.
You may say that we can release an e-book version of any of these. Readers can do animations, readers can project on a large screen, autographs can be scanned. The fur is a little harder to simulate. Doing any of the above would merely prove the point. None of them are the real thing.
These are special cases, to be sure, but important ones. Our world narrows if we lose the special cases. Your world is narrow indeed if it all has to fit on a six inch screen.