Can Kevin Kelly and Nick Carr both be right? A plausible thought about the future of the book.
Nick Carr likes the fixities of the printed book; Kevin Kelly agrees that "these are very real, and very attractive qualities," but likes the fluidities of the e-book.
Both make good points, but both are largely talking about the book as a designed object rather than the book as a tool for use. If we think in the latter terms the picture gets more complicated, not least because we have to think not only of the physical format (ink-on-paper versus pixels-on-screens or e-ink-on-screens) but also of underlying infrastructures.
For instance, consider these facts: (a) Reading is a major part of my job; (b) I annotate quite heavily the books I read for work; (c) I buy a lot of those books from Amazon in Kindle format. A while back I left my Kindle on an airplane, and the airline couldn't retrieve it; but when I bought a replacement I downloaded all the books I had read and there my annotations were, unchanged. In fact, I didn't even have to buy a replacement: I could have used the Kindle app for my Mac, or for the iPhone or iPad, or I could have read the books online, and in any of those environments my annotations would be present and identical. (On the web I can even copy and paste the passages I have highlighted and my own notes.)