Like me, any reader of this blog will be a lover of economics, ideas more generally, and books in particular. How strong is our attachment to that particular artefact, the book, rather than the ideas conveyed? How does the long format of a book, at least 50,000 words and usually much more, affect the ideas we have and how we process them? Questions prompted by two things: an especially interesting column by Tyler Cowen, Three Tweets for the Web, in the Wilson Quarterly (of course his blog Marginal Revolution is always interesting, one of my every-day visits). And the other, the fact that my husband Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147), the BBC's Technology Correspondent, has been testing the Amazon Kindle (launched in the UK this week) and Sony Reader. He blogged about them the other day on the BBC's dot life. We've had the two competing readers around at home for a week.

Here's the heart of Tyler's argument:

The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has
been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and
represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th
century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now
the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise,
all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has
changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web
has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention
to information. Overall, that’s a big plus for the new world order.

The article is really stimulating, well worth reading through – even though it will take more than 2 minutes.

I find it quite persuasive but have one big doubt, which is about the shrinking of sustained argument. There are things that might be lost if reading full-length serious books becomes even more of a minority interest than it is now. As someone who has written books, I know that it is a much stiffer test of one's arguments to have to sustain them over 250 pages without inconsistency and with due referencing of all the evidence. Is that a discipline we really want to see confined only to scholars?

Less seriously, there's the physical pleasure of reading a book, rather than something on screen. Even when that screen is as clever as the Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle. They are impressive bits of kit, and I simply don't want to sit on the sofa in the evening reading one of them, still less empty out the ranks of bookshelves in my house. The pricing of the books for download also seems unsustainably high to me, especially for a proprietary device which can be controlled by the vendor. I can see the potential of an improved device of this kind for loading up all the work-related papers one wants to read during the day, or the things I sometimes print off the internet to read on the train. But for books? No way. (But do read Rory's alternative view – he likes them.)

There's food for thought here for publishers. I suppose there's no downside in them making books available as e-books in different formats (subject to rights negotiations). But the upside potential for publishing in future may well lie in a different direction. The internet wave has washed over music and has cuaght up TV and film now. Books will be next.