One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in th… - Neal Stephenson

The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as 'near-fatal.' 'But it's okay,' he'd said, 'you'll black out before anything really bad happens to you.

Kath Two was the sort of person whose caches were apt to be crammed with paper books. For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.

Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses.