Listening to Closing the Book (CBC Ideas Jan 31, 2011) and reading Adam Gopnik's How the Internet Gets Inside Us was a good match.

Some points that stood out for me:

• I'm caught in two worlds: I like both the paper books and the electronic books, but the battle being fought at a systemic level. I won't be surprised that more and more books of interest to me will be made in digital form. Also the fact that we won't be living in a big house (which makes me a bit sad) will increase the relative advantage of digital works for me. The portability of books is appealing. I'm even toying with the idea of buying books to run on the Kindle software, specifically Complexity : A Guided Tour. I thought Philip Ball's Music Instinct was available in Kindle form, but not so.
• I long for software to help me order my digital life but Gopnik reminds me that a potent way to feel more grounded is to limit the amount of digital media I consume.
• I have wanted to contribute more to "future of the book". There are lot of good visionary ideas by Terry Jones of FluidInfo about "writable book APIs" in Fluidinfo » Blog Archive » Interview on writable book APIs & publishing at O’Reilly TOC. I wrote Pro Web 2.0 Mashups and have wanted to come back to transforming the book to a "living object". Finding the time and energy is a challenge, of course!