Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

halfway through a tank but don’t tell you how many miles or gallons you have to go until empty. By comparison, there’s no ignoring the handiness of the physical presence of a book as you hold it and the sense of achievement in knowing how far through it you’ve come.
    With ebooks, we also lose the ability to flip back and forth quickly through pages, as we can in a print book. I can flip through perhaps a hundred pages per second in a print book as I look for a given passage, but even on the fastest iPad, I can only see about ten pages per second. Current e-readers are still ten times too slow to match print books in this respect.
    So clearly, in some respects, print books are still superior to digital books. Just as we are what we eat, we are what we read. Literally. The act of reading changes the layout of the brain, rewiring it. The more your brain can engage with a book, the better the reading experience becomes, and the more you remember of what you read. And physical sensations—the texture of the paper, the smell of the ink, the raised or recessed letters on the book cover, a peeling price tag on the spine—all help center you in the reading experience and help distinguish one book from the next in your mind’s mental map.
    That’s not to say that e-reading doesn’t have advantages, though. And one key advantage is the ability to store and link the books you read.
    Some people take the time to meticulously write down and log each book they read, compiling a lifelong list of books that have influenced them. Digital books can not only enable all of us to keep such a list, but also help us do it better.
    More than academic curiosity drives people to log the books they’ve read. In some ways, it’s an intimate journal of your mental development. It gives you a ready way to look back on yourself as you were or to retrace ideas to their origins. It may even serve as a memory aid if you’re searching for a book you know you once read but subsequently forgot. Also, the act of creating this history helps solidify what you read and anchor it in your mind. It’s like you’ve clicked the Save icon on your word processor and are more likely to recall more of what you read because you saved it to memory.
    Ebooks could enable this history automatically for everyone, no effort needed. All it will take is one retailer—say, Barnes & Noble—to add a feature to the Nook that creates a website with a reading history of every Nook book you’ve read. Every time you buy a new book, it would add to that list, and you could share it with friends and brag about the books you’ve read.
    But I think the biggest boon that digital reading can give us is improved contact between people through better social connections. Reading is often a private experience, and current digital books encourage readers toward even more privacy by allowing them to interact with buttons and joysticks, with toggles and keyboards, instead of directly with other people. It’s so much easier to tweet a passage in an ebook we read than to call someone up and talk about it. Digital books are in some ways hastening the lazy, solipsistic narcissism of our culture. We use our gadgets as proxies for other people and genuine human interaction. And yes, I think that’s bad.
    As a species, we seem to be designed for social interaction, so taking that away leads to problems. For example, research has shown that staying socially engaged keeps a brain vital and fit. A 2001 study published by the American Academy of Neurology found that a healthy social life may cut the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 38 percent. Ebooks alone aren’t responsible for reducing the quality of our social interactions—we have telephones and chat windows and Facebook feeds to “thank” for this as well—but clearly, e-reading doesn’t have to be antisocial.
    However, the reading experience can change in the future. It can let you bring your friends or family into the book as you’re reading it. Digital books have the promise of giving you the choice, in the moment, of making reading public or private, depending on your mood.
    I’ll give some examples of these possibilities later in the book. But I want to pause here and agree with print-book lovers out there, because yes, you’re right. Digital books aren’t quite the same as print books.
    Not yet.

Bookmark: Love Letters Preserved between Pages
    Feeling nostalgic for print books today, I opened some of mine at