Mike Beeman lives in Boston and is a student at the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA program.

I love ebooks. I don’t read ebooks.

Let me explain. I think ebooks, digital readers, and digitized fiction in general are all great. More than that, they are being heralded as the natural direction for literature to move in. And rightly so. In theory, an ereader will be able to cut out the shipping boondoggle currently choking the publishing industry (despite, by most accounts, an actual growth in readership), and streamline the publishing process. A writer will write his or her book, an editorial team will edit the book, the readers will upload the book to their digital reader from the publisher’s website and read it. End of story. And this will all be accomplished much more quickly. Once the author has finished the book, it could conceivably take a matter of weeks, days, or even hours for the book to reach an audience, instead of the usual year or more it currently takes to publish a book (and that is for established authors).