Against the background of the Frankfurt Book Fair, which can be dated back to a few years after Gutenberg started promoting movable type, the previously stateside-only Kindle has landed in Europe.  Ever since e-Ink has shown that reading on-screen can be almost as pleasant as on-paper, the digital book has posed a huge number of questions about the future of print.  The only consensus so far is that the publishing world wants to avoid the pitfalls into which the music industry blindly fell.  A small exhibition of e-readers is currently on show in the Front Hall of the Library, for those wishing to see what these things are like in the flesh.

On a smaller scale, Americas Collections was pleased to note the arrival of one of the US's most interesting, and quaintly hip, imprints in digital form: McSweeney has 'dipped a fleshy toe into wireless waters'.  This small offering also highlights the not-so-small problem of how literary materials like these can be ingested by libraries (and yes, that is the rather digestive jargon preferred), making them available now and in the future.  More questions to be answered. 

Meanwhile, our colleagues (who sit just across the hallway) from the UK Web Archive have just released one piece in the jigsaw puzzle: a new iteration of the UK's archive of online materials, now with full-text searching.  But, everything is connected.  This new search facility is powered 'in the cloud' by the same people that make the Kindle. 

[M. S.]