Does digital size matter?

I share my buddy Steve Weddle's skepticism about whether eReaders are going to save publishing.

Sure, they might kill the used book market and temporarily increase sales. Maybe those Kindle and Nook and iPad buyers will keep buying books at higher than normal rate for a few years until they realize they're never going to get around to reading those 30 books they bought back when their toy was shiny and new.

But are eReaders going to create new audiences? Are people really going to read books on a screen when they wouldn't read on that icky, yucky paper stuff?

Not a chance.

I do think, though, that eReaders may impact the length of creative works.

The Big Secret (about the Massachusetts Election, and Everything Else)

My good friend Will Collier is giddy about Scott "This is My Truck" Brown's win in Massachusetts, and with good reason. A Republican takeover of Ted Kennedy's seat is no small feat.

No doubt Will and others will analyze the election to death. Many will argue that it's a refutation of Obama and liberalism. Of course, it was only a year ago that Obama's victory was supposedly a refutation of Bush and conservatism. And four years before that Karl Rove was rubbing his big fat belly and contemplating a "permanent Republican majority." So either there's a lot of refutation going on, and everything's speeding up, and the refutations are going to become weekly, and then daily, until everything starts spinning around and around really fast until we disappear into a black hole, or something else is going on.

I think I know what that something is. It ain't a big secret. The Big Secret of politics is that there's no secret. The better candidate usually wins--especially in an open seat.