When I visit a doctor or dentist I always look at their selection of magazines.  Hoping that their selection isn’t merely the magazines I subscribe to.

I received my last print edition of Newsweek yesterday.  My subscription expires March 12, 2013.  So the final 2½ months will available to me on their website.  Try taking those issues to the kitchen table or the bathroom (one of my favorite places to read).  For that matter I can’t give the magazines I have read to my friends.  Most of Newsweek’s really outstanding reporters and writers have been laid off so the quality of the magazine has been mediocre at best over the past year or two.  The newspapers have been shrinking in size and quality too.

That leaves me with those shrunken newspapers and just two periodicals.  Bloomberg Businessweek and The Week.  I anticipate their days are numbered too.  Both of them are publicizing their “apps” for the iPad and other e-tablets.

Perhaps the lovers of the horse and buggy were horrified when they saw their easily controlled mode of transportation replaced by those new fangled horseless carriages.

Going back in time to 1439, Johannes Gutenberg, a German blacksmith, invented a printing press with movable type and brought literacy to the world.  The use of movable type marked the end of the handwritten manuscript, which was the existing method of book production.

Perhaps the development of e-readers will bring literacy to even more people than ever before.  I can only hope.

As for me I will be in the bathroom with my e-reader, pocket size version.