It's very seductive. Any new medium gives you new ways of handling ideas.Most of them are very exciting in the short term, and some of them turn out to be exciting in the long term as well. But you mustn't lose sight of what's important - good stories, good characters, good dialog, hard thinking and ruthless editing. If you look at a movie like LostWorld:Jurassic Park, then once you get rid of all the astonishing special effects of dinosaurs there's nothing there at all. But we all get used to special effects. Whatever's radical and new in the cinema this year will be in shampoo commercials next year. Once people take computer animation for granted they will look at movies like that and be bewildered that anybody could have sat through something with so few actual ideas.

Didn't happen to me. At least I don't think it happened to me. Admittedly if it happened before last Thursday I wouldn't remember it anyway. But just at the moment, having the text of a book appearing on the net is not a wholly bad thing. The are very few people, I'm guessing, who would want to read an entire novel off a computer screen, so I think that most people who came across a novel on the net would end up reading a few pages and then thinking, heck I may as well go and get a copy of the book. Provided of course that the book has already been published. However, this situation may well change dramatically. The sort of device you might read a book on is going to get cheaper and lighter and so on. But the crucial thing is that the resolution will increase. When you have a device which is backlit and has, say 200 dpi, why would you want to read ink on dull, flattened woodpulp?