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" (Warning: Instant spoiler dead ahead!)  Harry Potter dies, but does not really die, a big battle ensues, and then the plucky young wizard kills the evil Lord Voldemort. That&amp;#039;s pretty much the long and short of the final episode from The Biggest Book Franchise Ever, available for $35 from Scholastic at your local bookstore\u2014or for free on the Internet. As has been widely reported, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was circulating around on file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent a full four days before it launched in stores, allowing jerky columnists such as myself to read and ruin the tale for real fans without having to pony up the dough for the physical hardcover.  The pirating of a blockbuster novel onto the peer-to-peer networks is one of those seminal moments that is supposed to herald a new era, wherein the old way (books) is cleared out by the new way (computers, e-books) and the days of paperbacks and hard-bound volumes become marginalized to the sentimental periphery of culture along with vinyl records and postcards. But the book world is a hard target for digital technology. If anything, the Harry Potter piracy should serve as an interesting anomaly. Whereas digital music, mail and now cinema are quickly changing the landscape of communication and entertainment, digital books seem to have had a much slower evolution. If digital novel sharing marks the death of books, I assure you it will be a long, slow death.  What makes books different and so resistant to the digital era? While e-books are cheap to distribute for publishers, bestsellers are relatively easy to pirate. After all, text is one of the easiest things to get onto a computer, scanners are cheap and offer high resolution, there are plenty of sophisticated reader software formats out there (.pdf, .lit, and so on) and books take up a fraction of the hard-drive space that music and movies do\u2014a large USB drive could conceivably hold thousands of books. Other printed matter such as newspapers and\u2014dare I say\u2014magazines have found fertile ground online. Plus, there is a huge library of public domain books available from sites such as Project Gutenberg, and publishers have made many e-books available for sale on sites from Ebooks.com to Sony&amp;#039;s Connect store (the Google Book Search saga is a whole &amp;#039;nother can of worms). By all accounts, people do read books on their computers, but there is no evidence whatsoever of an MP3-scale revolution. Computer-content geeks separate most consumable media into two categories: &amp;quot;lean forward&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;lean back.&amp;quot; Lean-forward content is highly interactive (think video editing or document writing), whereas lean-back is digestive. In reality, it is less of a distinction between two modalities and more of a continuum. Instant messaging? Lean forward. Movies? Lean back. Video games? Lean forward\u2014unless you have wireless controllers, which might mean lean back. Books are the ultimate lean-back medium, consumed in easy chairs, on trains or in bed, and generally preferred in a soft, natural light that&amp;#039;s easy on the eyes. Books are computer screen unfriendly, and they have yet to find the iPod-style portable device that will swing them forward into the digital age. But that&amp;#039;s not for lack of trying on the part of the technology industry: Numerous e-book devices have hit the market through the years. The most recent is Sony&amp;#039;s Reader, which is a well-engineered little device with a highly readable, nonbacklit screen that holds 80 books at a time and is simply too expensive at $300. Plus, Sony&amp;#039;s Connect store doesn&amp;#039;t offer any significant discounts for buying e-books that you couldn&amp;#039;t get by buying the physical book through Amazon or Barnes &amp;amp;amp; Noble. The technology behind the reader&amp;#039;s screen is from a company called E Ink, an MIT Media Lab spinoff that has, since its inception in 1997, been proclaimed the successor platform to the printed page. The problem is that the printed page is a damn-near perfect technology for text presentation and storage. It&amp;#039;s durable, requires no power or connectivity and is remarkably cheap to produce. Granted, print has its drawbacks: It is environmentally destructive, it can be hard to transport, and, once it&amp;#039;s done, the only way to update it is to reprint it. Despite digital technology&amp;#039;s theoretical ability to solve these problems, companies such as E Ink have spent years just trying to match the basic readability of print on paper. And, maybe I&amp;#039;m just being nostalgic, but thousands of books on a USB drive don&amp;#039;t offer the personal satisfaction of a bookshelf filled with your favorite novels, biographies, reference books and what have you. That said, the rise of e-books will arrive someday. Printing and paper costs are going up, and the technology is getting better. New devices such as Polymer Vision&amp;#039;s Cellular Book (available soon in Italy) are integrating E Ink&amp;#039;s technology into rollable displays. If electronic paper devices get seriously cheap and the content is compelling enough, then the convenience of the devices will be too great to overlook. All of my newspapers, magazines and a personal library of books in my pocket, updated every morning? Of course I want one. But I&amp;#039;m not clearing my bookshelves just yet. \u2014Glenn Derene TECH WATCH: An Alternative to Expensive e-Book Readers?  BUZZWORD: Read All of Glenn Derene&amp;#039;s Bi-Weekly Tech Trend Columns PLUS: Top 5 Harry Potter Gadgets We Crave (Photo illustration by Anthony Verducci, based on original cover art by Mary GrandPre/Scholastic)  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a2019/4220501/>