“More quickly than almost anyone predicted,” you point out in your leader on the transformation of the book industry, “e-books are emerging as a serious alternative to the paper kind” (“Disappearing Ink,” September 10, 2011). And Amazon is leading the new market as a retailer of choice. As you argue, publishers still have an important place in the industry, though. First, they act as venture capitalists by advancing money to promising authors; and second, they act as editors both by picking good books and by improving them. Agreed, of course. But you do not touch the future of the book as such. It has been around for centuries, if not millennia, because that was the best way to transmit ideas and information. The World Wide Web is now offering different modes of transmission, as witnessed by weblogs or blogs. This new format offers both terseness and continuity. An author can communicate with a reader, as well. And the publisher is pretty useless in the process. Even though e-books certainly have a future, the book’s future is far from assured. It itself may be a transitional form of transmission of ideas and information.