IF you ever have the good fortune to see a Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, the experience might go like this: On a sunny morning in Yosemite National Park, you walk through alpine meadows and then up a ridge to the summit of Mount Gibbs at 12,764 feet above sea level.

Midway through the first of five recent matches between Lee Sedol, a top-ranked professional Go player, and AlphaGo, a computer program conceived by Google DeepMind, an odd thing happened: Lee’s jaw dropped, hanging open for a nigh-cartoonish twenty seconds, and then he laughed.

I read a lot of content from articles/essays I save online. Sometimes I want to annotate these articles and organise them for research purposes. At the moment the best way to do this is Evernote, but I find the iPad / Android app clunky for reading and highlighting. The interface is designed for writing, and is a constant frustration. Are there any better solutions? Other 'solutions' I have tried:

Pocket: a fantastic service, I just wish they would add highlighting and notes!

Instapaper: offers a paid highlighting service. The app is great for reading, but for organising and extracting notes later it isn't good. Plus, the fee is too high.

Kindle: for a while I saved articles to Kindle for later highlighting. Is worked pretty well until I wanted to extract my notes, at which point I came up against the closed wall of the Amazon system.

Diigo: their online highlighting service is pretty fantastic, but the iPad app is just awful, and hardly works as it is supposed to.

Convert to pdf: I could convert everything I want to read/highlight to PDF and use an app like the fantastic PDF Expert to highlight and save. But this feels like too much hard work.

This is a question that has been asked before. But I am hoping that something new and extraordinary has come along!

A few days ago a blogger who identifies himself as just "Philip" took to his site to recount his experience of reading War and Peace – specifically, a 99¢ version as sold through Barnes and Noble's Nook store. A contextually important reminder: the Nook is Barnes and Noble's answer to Amazon's Kindle and the two devices have invariably been pitted against each other in a kind of ereader war.

When, however, Philip came across the line, "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern", the Kindle/Nook rivalry wasn't foremost in his mind. Instead, he thought he'd just stumbled on an unorthodox verb-translation or some other minor textual hiccup. It was only when that rogue "Nookd" struck again that he realised, via the text's search function, that every instance of the word "kindle" or "kindle" had, in fact, been changed to "Nook" and "Nookd".

Which means Tolstoy has been subjected to indignities – and absurdities – such as this: "When the flame of the sulphur splin

Over the past several days, a certain Star Trek: The Next Generation prose piece has ensnared the popular imagination the world over. It's a story that's been recycled since time immemorial, due to its sheer cross-cultural thematic resonance.

I am, of course, referring to author Kitty Glitter's Amazon Kindle tour de force Wesley Crusher: Teenage Fuck Machine, an edifying fable in which the Enterprise's resident rascal has a sexual awakening during a threesome with a barbed-penised cat man. Also, Captain Jean Luc Picard is walloped in the gonads.

E-books Can't Burn: Could it be that ebooks bring us closer to the Could it be the fact that the e-book thwarts our ability to find particular lines by remembering their position on the page? Or our love of scribbling comments (of praise and disgust) in the margin? It’s true that on first engagement with the e-book we become aware of all kinds of habits that are no longer possible, skills developed over many years that are no longer relevant. We can’t so easily flick through the pages to see where the present chapter ends, or whether so and so is going to die now or later. In general, the e-book discourages browsing, and though the bar at the bottom of the screen showing the percentage of the book we’ve completed lets us know more or less where we’re up to, we don’t have the reassuring sense of the physical weight of the thing (how proud children are when they get through their first long tome!), nor the computational pleasures of page numbers (Dad, I read 50 pages today). This can be a problem for academics: it’s hard to give a proper reference if you don’t have page numbers.

Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. On a twenty-six-dollar book, the publisher receives thirteen dollars, out of which it pays all the costs of making the book. The author gets $3.90 in royalties. Bookstores return about forty per cent of the hardcovers they buy; this accounts for $5.20 per book. Another $3 goes to overhead costs and the price of producing and shipping the book—leaving, in the best case, about a dollar of profit per book.

Though this situation is less than ideal, it has persisted, more or less unchanged, for decades. E-books called the whole system into question. If there was no physical book, what would determine the price? Most publishers agreed, with some uncertainty, to give authors a royalty of twenty-five per cent, and began a long series of negotiations with Amazon over pricing. For

Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast