I just finished reading an article entitled “How The E-book Will Change The Way We Read And Write” in the April 20 Wall Street Journal. It makes me wonder when our plant manuals will become available electronically and all we have to take into the field is an ebook reader instead of those heavy manuals. Maybe some manuals are, I just don’t have a Kindle to find out. I imagine that we will soon be accessing manuals and online identification websites through e-readers, smartphones, or netbooks. It will be interesting to see if it makes plant identification easier. I tend to like indented keys rather than bracketed or random access keys which many websites feature. When the hardware becomes light enough and portable enough and the the internet is accessible in most places, we should see an increase the the ease of identifying plants. Maybe sites like Twitter could provide instant identifications from others monitoring the site. The future holds many possibilities to make it easier for the amateur and professional as well to identify our native flora. – Steve Young