You know, I keep poring over some of the programs offered at these grad schools, and I'm astonished by how myopic many perceptions of digital storytelling actually are. Lots of people are declaring e-books "dead in the water", without even beginning to assess exactly why e-books aren't that interesting. First, the media isn't right yet – reading books on a low-res screen sucks. When digital paper actually works, then you may have something. Second, e-books in their current generation don't offer enough to a reader. You've got to expand your ideas of what the media offers in order to really advance it. I'll expound more on this tomorrow.

What astonishes me are the great stretches of apparently undiscovered country that extend between where the research is actually being done and what's dying on the open market. Walter Bender's electronic publishing group at MIT (which is where Cameron Barlowe of Blogdex fame is doing his work) is interesting, but they seem to be only focusing on the news. The news! There's so much more to electronic publishing than just the news. What gives?