Sign Your E-book?

Margaret Atwood, take note. Your LongPen has nothing on Amazon's Kindlegraph, a service which allows authors to "sign" e-books. As Paul Carr of Tech Crunch wrote last week, "Yeah. Ok. So it's not quite the same as having an author sign your physical copy of his or her book."

The technology is cool, and I'd even agree that the way in which it connects author and reader so easily and so broadly might make for interesting study one day, but it also strikes me as lazy and anti-social. The book-signing process is one that brings authors, readers, and fellow readers together under one roof to celebrate the writer, the reader, the book, literature in general. Does it really mean much if a writer sitting in his London home can scratch off a "To Rebecca, With my best wishes" on a digital file that will magically appear on my (theoretical) Kindle whilst I am still sleeping in NY?

To see a demonstration, go here.