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

all the print books once they’re digitized? They won’t, and how can they? There’s simply too much material to store.
    So there’s going to be a massive die-off of print books. They’re not emigrating, flying overseas with the sound of pigeon flutter as their pages loft them through the sky. Books are dying. Future archaeologists will speak of the Gutenberg Era and the sharp discontinuity of our time, characterized by a major extinction event that has left no print books in the fossil records.
    The artwork of Georgia O’Keefe often depicts bleached skulls on a desert landscape. When artists get around to painting the end of the Gutenberg Era, they’ll perhaps paint the bleached books left behind on the literary landscape.
    I think highly of printed books, but I already think of them as bone-white, bleached, inert, and dead—unlike ebooks, which seem to sparkle with electricity and wonder. I look at my walls of printed and bound books like they’re all polished skulls in a curio cabinet. Just as I’m achingly sad to see them go, I’m also excited at moving onward into the future, into the digital.
    But what about you? Have you come to terms with the death of printed books? Have you grieved, in your way? Care to share your thoughts or help others through the mourning process?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/21.html

Reading: A Dying Art?
    I can’t appreciate fiddle music. No matter how good it is, fiddle music sounds to me like someone plucking the guts of a sick cat. But I know, rationally, that there must be truly great fiddle players. My mind understands this, even if it can’t appreciate that kind of music.
    Some things are simply matters of taste. Cilantro. Sushi. Cuban cigars. Krautrock. Spiders. There are no doubt items in this list that you find distasteful. And perhaps some that you appreciate, as a connoisseur might. Your taste for these is partly learned. In our country, we have developed an appreciation for sushi, for example, which is essentially raw fish. Spiders, by contrast, rarely make it onto the haute cuisine menus of our restaurants.
    Culture is shifty, and as anyone who has traveled outside his or her home country knows, it can vary widely. And yet, some parts of culture are universal.
    We all have an innate sense of storytelling, for example.
    Whether you look at the oral culture of the Homeric Greeks, or the stories of the Navajo, or the stories of Jonathan Swift or Charles Dickens or any contemporary author, you’ll find that most stories deal with people. This should come as no surprise. As people, we care about other people. It’s part of our tribal ape heritage. It’s wired into us. We’re programmed by patterns in our own brains to care about people, to find them fascinating, and to see them even when they’re not present, like ghost lights in the dark.
    As an example, consider pareidolia . It sounds like a disease, but it’s the surprisingly common tendency we have to see faces where none exist. And not just any faces—not bear faces or panda faces or fish faces—but the faces of people. We see them in whorls of wood and in the clouds overhead. There’s even a shrine to a tortilla in southern New Mexico. If you look hard enough at the tortilla, you can see the face of Jesus. We have triggers that fire when we see things that resemble faces. These triggers sometimes misfire, hence pareidolia. Looking for faces is clearly important to us because it’s biologically programmed.
    Our sense of story is just as innate.
    Good stories work well when they engage us in what we care about. Fiction does well when it paints a clear picture of a person, outfitting him with a camel-hair coat and a red beard. If the picture is too abstract, we don’t engage. Likewise, a cookbook will fail to make us salivate if it doesn’t have a photo of a pastry drizzled in chocolate sauce or a glistening sirloin steak cooked to perfection.
    This preponderance of detail is what makes books work best. It takes a special kind of reader to enjoy Samuel Beckett and his abstract, disembodied fictions. We need details. Details resonate with us. Or, more properly, they resonate with our imaginations.
    As far as I know, no clinician has isolated the imaginative faculty. It can’t be seen in any anatomy book. There are no brain labs at Harvard where rabbits are being vivisected to find the elusive imaginative faculty. It can’t be removed with forceps or pinned to a Styrofoam dissection tray. There are no