Books in the Cloud
One of the benefits of an e-book, over a traditional publication is that it is disconnected from the physical world. It has been virtualized. It is a bunch of bits that reside “somewhere” that you copy onto your reading device which converts it into a visual rendition of the text. The somewhere can be on your PC at home, on a laptop you carry with you, on a thumb drive in your pocket, or stored on a server that you can access through the internet. Once on the internet, the location of the book can no longer be expressed in longitude and latitude, or country and zip code. It is no longer in real space, it is in cyberspace! Since cyberspace evokes scenes from TRON or books by William Gibson, the world marketing minds of the Internet® decided to call it “the cloud.”