The book and its time

It does strange things to your sense of time, to be in transition between two technologies of print: the new electronic one beckons you to step lightly on, into the future, but again and again confronts you with a wall, which has all the solidity of brick; while the old technology piles up its objects around you with such persistence, it is as if the past had developed an unstoppable momentum of its own. For all its promise of change, therefore, time appears not just to be standing still, but to be going backwards.