As I head towards the end of my unit of study on Literature in the Digital Environment I am less perplexed but more amazed at the diversity in the origins and evolution of digital formats. The first medium to lend itself towards the capabilities of the digital medium was film even if this originally meant physically cutting and reattaching strips of film stock to itself. We could copy, cut, rearrange, and join unique works together to make further new works. The computer has made this process easier and quicker and now our aspirations race to meet the boundaries of what can be achieved with technology. I want to reaffirm the point that I made in an earlier post that authors are emailing manuscripts to publishers who are emailing them to printers and without the connection to physical typesetting there is a very real sense that the majority of works are now in some sense digital as they have passed through the gateway of transmission over the internet and benefited from the affordences that this entails. The world is certainly changing and no less within our education environments and school libraries. There is an expectation from some that ebooks will in certain ways supplant the physical texts and this is not borne out in the practices we see in students. We need to balance the salivation of cost cutting visionaries who might wish a compleatly online library that is accessed by the student via a BYOD program. The reality is that the different use cases of learners, projects, and systems will dictate a range of resources for different circumstances and the physical book remains an efficient, flexible, economic choice for both students and librarians. It is the shark of the information ocean; ancient, effective, and powerful.