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+I first concieved of the iPod in spring1998. A friend had just purchased a mini disc player. We were looking at it, talking about the evolution on music formats -- 12 inch vinyl, three inch CD, two inch mini-disc. We decided that what would be really great is if all your music could fit on a single device, something about the size of a deck of cards.
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+We had to wait a few years, but the iPod and it's immitators have more the fulfilled our basic request. We should I susppose by very happy about this development. It was what we wanted after all.
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+But somewhere along the way, I lost touch with music and I blame, not the iPod exactly, but the move from tangible to ephemral which brought with it certain unconscious changes that we had not anticipated.
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+I'm not a luddite. I like technology and while everything that follows are problems, real problems I believe, I'm not giving up my iPod, nor am I pining for the return of some archaic format like Vynal or CDs.  No, I don't want to go backwards, but with so many other tangible objects in our lives heading toward the ephemral it seems worth taking stock of what exactly is different, because certainl;y, something *is* different.
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+with services like Spotfiy or Pandora putting infinite amounts of music 
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+It is harder for music to have a kind of profound impact that it used to. The ritual has been removed, there is no more tuesday night trip to the music store, no unwrapping the package, no pouring over the cover art, no struggling with the annoying shrink wrap and those stupid stickers that cover to the top of Cd spines; no more fiddling with the six disk changer, waiting for the slow door to open, waiting for it to rotate around to the empty slot, stick in your Cd and finally, finally hit play.
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+A lot of that process was cool; a lot of it sucked. But the one thing it was was tangible. Now I head to Amazon, search through a million albums, find one I want, click buy and Mp3's download. There might even be labum artwork I can flip through on the screen. But there will never be anything tangible about the experience. There will simply be a few extra lines in iTunes, a new playlist perhaps on my iPod. 
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+None of this really matters, or rather it matters, but it is far too late for music. Music is what it is now, the experinece is no longer tangible, the music has shrunk away into nothing. But for books the story is only now beginning to be written. The Kidle, for all it's charm, is essentially the stone wheel of electronic reading devices. It's round and we can all see the potnetial of the concept, but at the moment is does nothing to enhance the reading experience beyond what the ipod initially offered -- everything in a pint size package.
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+Eventually readers like the Kindle may come out with something that takes reading far beyond where the book is, adds something to the reading experience that makes the book, not obsolete, but somthing entirely idifferent. The e-reader of the future, if we believe in bright rutures, will be something more than a bunch of books in a plastic shell. 
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