Back to the future of print

E-readers offer ease of use, but are unlikely to replace the printed page.

When I took stock of my recent reading, it occurred to me that I haven't read a single e-book this year. Actually, my e-readers have been gathering dust for even longer - like other old electronic gadgets, they've been ditched in the junk drawer.

But an e-reader is not exactly like a floppy disk or a cassette recorder from the 1980s. Only three years ago, as one of the early adopters of e-books in China, I would read one or two e-books every week, all of which had been sourced from the Web, with the genres ranging from memoirs to histories to management theories to fiction.