SFRevu magazine has just published a wide-ranging interview with me and a great review of my forthcoming short story collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.
SFRevu: Will ebooks ever get traction? Do you read electronically? How does that experience differ from reading on a full size display and print?Cory: People already read "ebooks" — that is to say, the majority of readers presently spend the majority of their reading time reading on screens. They don't read longer form works that way (by and large) and it's likely they never will. The computer screen has its own affordances that will drive new forms of creativity.
This isn't just about resolution or form-factor. The point of a computer is that it is multi-purpose, networked, and social. It does lots of things, and it wants your attention to wander around its infinite depths. Long linear narratives just don't work well in that medium.
I'll channel a little Eric Flint here. Reading novels has always been a minority pass-time, and the people who read novels fetishize the form factor the way that, say, a classic car hobbyist loves his tailfins. I recently wrote an op-ed for Forbes where I described these people as "pervy for paper" (I count myself among them). For us, the paper codex has value that has nothing to do with its technical merit.
