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

and take it out to talk.)
    The arguments Socrates had against reading are relevant and deep, and you should get to know them. He argued that by reading, we were too lazy with what we learned. We would say that we had learned something because we read it, but we hadn’t actually pondered or questioned it the way he would, the way someone in an oral culture would when memorizing a text, by constantly listening to it and internalizing it and gradually challenging or accepting it. Socrates felt that this act of questioning was of supreme importance to personal growth.
    Although I’m an ebook evangelist, in many ways I agree with Socrates, because there’s more to school than memorizing facts. I’m of the opinion that a dialogue process is important with any book, that you need to wrestle with the book (or ebook) and what the author is trying to say.
    The same arguments Socrates made about reading itself apply to the digital. He’d be out in the streets right now, complaining about the lack of critical skills in children and their inability to think critically about what they read on the web. You might want to read what Socrates said in the Phaedrus and come to your own conclusions about whether we should read and how. If after that you still believe in reading, then there’s no barrier to digital reading.
    If you look at the true importance of what books mean to our culture—and I mean human culture, all culture—then books, in many ways, are what separate us from other animals. Books educate. They convey culture. With a book you can set down all your wisdom and accumulated learning for posterity, and others can read your book long after you’ve passed on and still learn from you. This is how cultures grow—exponentially fast.
    You can’t get this without writing. It’s just that simple. There’s a limit to what you can teach person to person through conversation alone and to what the listener can remember and build on from their recollections. And true, you can still say a lot in an oral culture such as preliterate Greece, the same culture that gave birth to Homer and his incredible blind recitations, inspired poetry of the Iron Age.
    Homer’s poems were entirely oral, and like him, a diminishing number of preliterate poets still recite heroic oral stories and thus convey the core concepts that define their cultures—concepts like nobility, fighting for what’s right, and truth and justice. But it’s much harder to educate someone about the art of metallurgy or statecraft through an epic poem. It’s nearly impossible to teach medicine or any other science without having a text, something large enough and capable enough to hold the sheer volume of details.
    We’re unique as a species, we humans, because we created books as educational tools to augment the little that we can convey orally from person to person. There’s as much of a distance between our Stone Age ancestors and the preliterate Greeks as there is between the Greeks of Homer’s age and the literate billions who now inhabit the earth.
    Language is responsible for an explosion of culture and vibrancy and human richness, but it was made exponentially richer by writing, whether in the form of books or scrolls or cuneiform tablets. We’re not born with all of our culture’s teachings inside our heads, the way animals are born, the way animals know instinctively what to eat or what the shadows of their predators look like. Animals rely on instinct, but we rely on being educated, on stories and tales told by mothers to their children or grandchildren. We put these stories down in books so they can educate any number of generations who follow, and we rely on these stories.
    We’re born with enormous brains, but we’re born without instincts for self-preservation. Baby ponies and lambs can start walking and eating a few hours after they’re born, but we take years to do the same. Large as they are, our eggshell-fragile skulls are too small when we’re born to hold the wealth and weight of our culture, and it’s not passed down through the generations by instinct alone. We rely on culture to teach us even the most basic things, like how to groom ourselves or bathe or eat and drink. And likewise more sophisticated skills, like hunting or agriculture. These cultural inventions are learned and taught, in turn, to the next generation through books.
    We’ve come far in our culture, to the point that we now have digital books and can pick one