Why Innovation Doffs an Old Hat

NY Times: "Just as the average human carries around the remnants of a prehistoric tail and a useless appendix, the tools we use also bear marks of the evolutionary process from which they arose. Add to that list Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle, which will now supplement its 'location numbers' with page numbers that correspond to physical books. The change, announced last week, does have a practical purpose — especially for book clubs, whose digital readers presumably will no longer have trouble looking up the same page as analog readers. But there is also a sense of absurdity here. E-books, by definition, do not have pages. Depending on which size font someone uses, she may have to advance the screen many times before 'turning a page.' Then there are the questions of how to approach books with many physical editions, or texts that exist only in digital space. ... "