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

have had.
    That said, the allure of reading is waning. Books are less of a status symbol now than ever before. Our gadgets themselves are the new status symbols, not what we can do with them. And we seem, as a culture, to crave multifunctional devices. Tablets that surf the web and play games. Smartphones that speak back to you sassily.
    If our gadgets can be used for reading ebooks, it’s often as an afterthought. You don’t see people getting pulled over by the police for reading ebooks on their smartphones. They get caught for text messaging. (Although if I were a state trooper, I think I’d let someone go with a simple warning if I caught him reading a good book while driving.) I think this rise in gadget lust and waning interest in reading presages a decline in basic book literacy.
    You might argue that, at the very least, our gadgets are helping us use the internet more successfully. But a 2011 study conducted by the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries Project showed that recent internet-savvy college students performed poorly at basic research skills using Google or other search engines. Reading and book literacy may be necessary prerequisites for learning how to refine information and communicate effectively.
    There are convoluted semiotic theories of communication that I won’t delve into here, but most such theories agree that information is always encoded, transmitted, and deciphered. For example, an author has an idea that he encodes in English with suitable words. The idea is then printed, and then a reader reads the sentences and tries to decode the meaning of the idea. Errors can be introduced at each step in the process, such as the author encoding the sentence with the wrong word (a misspelling or incorrect usage), or the publisher printing the sentence incorrectly, or perhaps the reader not knowing a given word and therefore being unable to decode the sentence or incorrectly interpreting its overall meaning.
    For books, it takes longer to encode an idea than to decode it; in other words, it takes longer to write a sentence than it does to read it. These two sentences, for example, were started at a Chinese restaurant in Albuquerque, improved on while driving to a chile pepper festival near the Mexican border, reassembled a week later during a terrible rainstorm, and edited four months later on an airplane.
    Writing is complex, even though the basic units of writing are comparatively simple. We have twenty-six letters, twice as many when you factor in lower and upper cases, plus a handful of common punctuation symbols. That’s about eighty different symbols, which doesn’t seem like a lot to work with. But consider DNA. Although it only has four basic nucleotides, or four symbols, these encode for all life on this planet, in all its diversity. So writing is complex. With all this complexity, there’s a lot of room for error in between the encoding and decoding of this information.
    So why do we use books?
    Books are good for more than being a barrier against the outside world when you need anonymity and good for more than propping up the occasional table or chair. Books strike a happy balance between price, cost to produce, and efficiency of communication. Pound for pound, few information sources are cheaper than a book. Sources that are cheaper (such as pamphlets) tend not to last as long as a book, so when you amortize the cost of production over time, a book is the clear winner. And because so many books are produced in one print run, the costs tend to be low.
    There are more expensive forms of information transmission, but few of us can afford a polymathic private tutor like Pangloss from Candide to follow us around. Besides, books offer an improvement on a private tutor because you can read and learn at your own pace, as fast or as slow as you please. Even in a college environment with perhaps twenty students to one teacher, you still can’t push a fast-forward button on the teacher to skip the slow parts of a lecture, unless it’s a prerecorded lesson. Even then, no visual or audio cues indicate when you get to an interesting part. But you can easily skim through a book to get to the cool parts.
    Books are priceless. Without them, we’re little more than monkeys who have learned to wear expensive wristwatches and designer sunglasses. We’ve been elevated into an order above all other animals by books, by language, and by story. Books can give us unattainable orients