But there is a dark shadow across these promising new fields. Digital words are disposable words. Partly the problem is technological; mostly it is psychological. Ink and paper (or parchment or papyrus) have functioned brilliantly as a presentation and storage medium for a couple of thousand years. It’s easy to read a 300-year-old book or a 2,000-year-old scroll. Can you imagine booting a 2,000-year-old computer? For a technologist, “permanent” means the next 20 minutes.

Digital words are easy to write, change, send, forget. They lack the dignity of the printed word. It’s hard to throw out a book, even if you don’t need or want it; it’s easy to delete a million bits without thinking twice. Young writers know that blogs are cutting-edge but want to see their pieces, nonetheless, in real ink on real paper in real books, newspapers or magazines.

Digital words seem cheap because they are, and they grow cheaper by the day. Consider the withering hailstorm of mail, text, social net and blog posts that assaults you the moment you go online. It’s become impossible for many a normal, solid citizen to answer his email promptly. But young people seem increasingly apt to ignore uninteresting messages on purpose. If the message is important it will be resent, and if it isn’t, who cares anyway? So the value of digital words sinks even lower.