In addition to making it easier and incredibly immediate to purchase books, Johnson sees E-Book technology being able to create a searchable, “shadow version” of the entire library of books one has read from childhood to the present.

“It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you’ve read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven’t encountered yet.”

Johnson also notes data from Amazon showing Kindle owners buying far more books since purchasing the device.  The flipside of the ease of impulse buying is the equal ease the author finds in jumping from book to book.  As if our attention spans weren’t shrinking enough already, Johnson points out the difficulty in maintaining “linear, deep-focus reading” on a device in which the reader can instantly switch to almost any other book in the world — or easily jump online to surf the web.

E-Books are also beginning to impact the library world, as noted in the April 13 issue of the journal Library Hotline.  A piece here notes Amazon’s mixed responses to libraries who are checking out Kindles to their patrons.

Apparently, Amazon does not pursue enforcement of their policy excluding library lending, thanks in part to a grey area of interpretation of their Terms of Service.  The policy blocking “distribution” to any third party is vague enough for some libraries to have begin lending the devices, a service one library director in New Hampshire describes as “a great opportunity” for patrons to discover that they like the new technology and consider purchasing their own.

Library E-Book lending could also be a cheaper alternative to Inter-Library Loans and expensive newspaper subscriptions, but the $360+ replacement fee for returning a damaged Kindle rather dwarfs the usual ten-cents-per-day overdue fee so many of us have gotten used to.

Johnson’s Wall Street Journal piece also notes the possibility of E-Books ushering in a “standardized micropayment system” for online content that could even, in a happily ironic twist, help make newspapers profitable again.