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

crackpot scientists posting papers about the imaginative faculty in the pages of Nature or online sites like arXiv. The imaginative faculty cannot be bottled like a freakish two-headed snake in a bottle of ether at a carny sideshow. In fact, the imaginative faculty resists my own attempts to describe it, which is why I can only say what it isn’t.
    But we all have this imaginative faculty. One theory for why we have this relies on evolutionary psychology, which offers explanations based on how our original human ancestors might have experienced life in the savannahs of Africa. If you believe in evolution, this theory might explain the imaginative faculty as an extension of being aware of predators and prey.
    In the savannah, you would have to be alert to lions or tigers. You might imagine a tiger approaching if you heard a twig snap in the dark, and you’d react accordingly. Likewise, as a hunter, you would have to put yourself inside the head of your prey to capture it. You would have to think like a wildebeest, for example. Put yourself into her hooves. Anticipate how she might react, which rocks she might jump over, which trees she might try to hide behind.
    In this sense, hunting requires storytelling. And because imagination is linked to our very survival—the ability to eat and the fear of being eaten—this faculty may have developed over time as an evolutionary adaptation, linked of course to our large brains.
    However this faculty adapted, we can use it to put ourselves inside a really good book. Your second-grade teacher might have helped you to develop an appreciation for books, but it was always innate inside you. I would even bet you first discovered your imaginative faculty while reading a book when you were a kid. Perhaps it was a fantasy book about wizards of angelfire who fought dragons, or a comic book about Krypton or Eternia, or a story you imagined of Bible heroes flying through the sky.
    The imaginative faculty is part of our human condition. We look for patterns and apply them to ourselves. We read a book and patch the details provided by the author together with those from the circumstances of our own lives. Whose face does the man in the red beard wear? Your mind fills the gaps with details from your own imagination. Perhaps you see the face of an old professor behind the red beard. An author doesn’t need to spell out all the details when he writes. He can rely on you, as a reader, to fill them in.
    You patch these details in with your imaginative faculty, just as you sometimes see faces in knotted wood.
    This faculty is innate, but it can be improved by training.
    One doesn’t go straight from reading Dick and Jane books to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot . But we do become gradually more voracious readers as our critical thinking skills improve and as we learn to look for nuance and ambiguity. We learn to crave details that get gradually more complex and characters that are less black and white. As for words, we come to crave the occasional neologism.
    We crave, in fact, the fullness that experience itself can bring. And when we can’t get it from an author’s own words, we patch in our own experience. When you read a book of fiction, you use details from your own life to fill in the author’s missing gaps. You caulk the author’s stories with scraps from your own outlook and knowledge.
    Reading demands a lot out of you. Out of all readers, in fact.
    Sadly, reading rates are dropping, although existing readers are not giving up the reading habit. Once you’re a reader, you’re always a reader. What’s happening instead is that fewer people are developing the reading habit every year. It takes time for a child to develop this imaginative faculty to a point where it becomes rewarding. It takes time for the feedback loop to kick in. There are not enough new readers buying books every year, which is a matter of population dynamics. For a population to grow, there have to be more net births than deaths. Unless this decline is arrested, reading will decline.
    I could stand on my soapbox on ten thousand street corners, talking about how important reading is, but it wouldn’t help. I could have my own TV show that teaches kids about reading, with LeVar Burton and Justin Bieber and a masked Mexican wrestler, and it still wouldn’t be enough.
    I could airlift a million copies of Dick and Jane over the poorest part of Appalachia, the area with the country’s lowest literacy rates, but