It's a topic that many of us are struggling with these days - where and how should we acquire the books that entertain, educate, and enliven our worlds? In this MacNotables podcast, Andy Ihnatko and Adam range widely across the pros and cons of the many possibilities, bemoaning the loss of small bookstores and library budgets while simultaneously acknowledging the many advantages of ebooks. No hard and fast answers, sorry, but we think you'll enjoy the conversation.

New York Times contributor Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, has written a thoughtful article on the ramifications of data persistence on the Web. Those who share personal information via social networking services are being forced to come to terms with the Internet's extraordinary capability to preserve past actions, beliefs, and versions of oneself for posterity, causing problems as the lines between the real and virtual, and the past and the present, become ever fuzzier. Rosen provides an overview of the legal, technological, and social solutions we might employ to overcome this new inability to forget.

Blogger Mike Cane has a thought-provoking post about the move away from "thingness," whether you're talking about physical or electronic objects. As thingness becomes less important, he suggests, online access becomes far more important. After all, do people who have Netflix subscriptions still buy as many DVDs? We certainly don't. Worth a read - even if this isn't true of you now, we agree that the world is moving in this direction.

Our friend Jason Snell of Macworld has a must-read piece on how Apple used the iPhone OS 4 announcement to take aim at a variety of competitors: Google's Android operating system, App Store critics, Adobe, and (again) Google. Jason is, as usual, spot on, and his conclusion should be required reading for anyone complaining about Apple's behavior.