Downloading Dickens: Inevitable, or a Fantasy?

Richard Brookhiser in the New York Observer

In sum, the e-book loses, or at best ties, any one-on-one competition with an existing traditional book. But when books are considered en masse, in libraries or even in multi-volume sets--encyclopedias, legal codes, the standard edition of Sigmund Freud, the complete Harry Potter--the e-book begins to look like a future that will happen, because it serves a need.