The term digital ephemera almost sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s something that booksellers and collectors are beginning to pay more attention to. The monumental shift away from typewriters and hand written letters/manuscripts is drastically changing the way we view ephemera and collectibles.

I hadn’t really considered emails and electronic manuscripts as ephemera believing they would essentially hold the same value as a photocopied letter since there can be no real proof of it being the original. This concept is being challanged by some and the vote is still out. Only time will tell if that email you got from Stephen King could eventually be sold on eBay.

However no matter what the outcome, the desire to collect something close to an author is not going to disappear simply because the author has gone electronic. AbeBooks recently sold one of George Bernard Shaw’s typewriters for several thousand dollars, and I don’t see why John Updike‘s laptop would be any different.

Even if the types of ephemera that we collect change drastically, we will always search for a way to connect with the author, and of course we will always have signatures!