This week’s Fast Fact comes from across the pond (appropriately, as you’ll see) and Two Sides UK, which reprinted an article from Bookseller and Publisher, asking the question, “Are E-Books Sustainable?”—not, I hasten to add, in the environmental sense, but the business model sense: “Crippled by territorial license restrictions, digital rights management, and single-purpose devices and file formats that are simultaneously immature and already obsolescent...ebooks are at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared to full-fledged websites and even the humble PDF.” Why should you care? My brother works in the production department of a major book publisher, and a couple of years ago had various e-book formats (EPUB, primarily) foisted upon him and his lament to me, in a Boston pub one night, was “[Expletive deleted], why can’t we just use PDFs?” Having fought with the EPUB and Kindle formats for my own books, I can certainly sympathize. But the pain in the tuchis for book designers is just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a personal anecdote. May 25 was Towel Day, a tribute to the works of comedy/science-fiction author Douglas Adams. I was traveling, and took the opportunity to reread my old copy of The Hitchchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the edition I have is an “advance reading copy” my uncle (who used to work for Pocket Books) gave me back in 1979. I also bought the other four books in the trilogy (!) as they came out, long before e-books. (The titular guide itself in the novel was, however, an e-book that eerily predicted today’s handheld computers and e-book readers.) But I think about the e-books I have bought, and wonder if I will be able to read them in 10, 20, 30 years from now. The print books that line my living room (and office) walls can be picked up and read any time I feel like it. (Although I can safely say from experience that professional movers absolutely love the idea of e-books.) The same could actually be argued about the Web. The fragility of many links notwithstanding, much Web-based content is surprisingly long-lived, and what helps is that it is not in a proprietary format, nor is (usually) constrained by DRM. I do think it likely that today’s e-book formats will be replaced by the Web and/or PDF. We can only hope. Anyway, the theme of this week’s actually rather Slow Fact, is that sustainability can refer to many things... For more Two Sides facts see www.twosides.us/mythsandfacts.