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

personalize it.
    I think any piece of media is capable of such a reading. A movie doesn’t have to be a classic like Citizen Kane . It could be anything, as long as you resonate with it and read into it with your imaginative faculty. Because books demand this form of reading, they’re here to stay for a long time in print or digital form—at least for that select group of people who enjoy imaginative reading.
    For such people, books demand to be read. And they demand your attention. And paradoxically, because books by their nature aren’t as visually or auditorily rich as other forms of media, they engage our imaginations more strongly because of our need to patch in details. It’s a wonderful feedback loop: the more we read, the more we need to read and the less satisfied we are by entertainment that panders to our senses but deprives our imaginations. Once a reader is hooked, there’s no way to give up the habit.
    As readers who are accustomed to the deep resonance we have come to enjoy when our imaginations are engaged, we’re hooked. And ultimately, because the imagination is so innate, no simple technological silver bullet can be applied to books or ebooks to make people read more. It doesn’t work that way. Reading—whether you’re reading a book or “reading” a movie—is a personal act of volition, of attention, of mindfulness. Reading comes from within. It takes energy. But it’s also so very rewarding. Reading is a gift that keeps giving.
    At least, as long as you’re able to pay attention to what you’re reading.

Bookmark: Attention Spans
    As retailers move toward tablets to let you consume all kinds of media, we’re finding that our focus often gets diluted and our attention spans get—what? What was I saying? Hold on, let me check my email and do a quick tweet.
    Don’t get me wrong. I’ve paid more than my fair share of dollars toward Apple’s billions in app sales. And I’ve done this with the drawback that when I do read on my iPad, I often find myself bouncing from the ebook application to the browser or to Facebook or a bunch of other applications. And the single-threaded reading experience that I get with dedicated e-readers or even print books is lost.
    The reading I do on my iPad is more like snacking than eating a full meal. That wonderful faculty I have in my brain as I read, the way that my temporal and parietal lobes light up as I explore what-ifs and puzzle out the layers of meaning in the book I’m reading—well, on a tablet, those lights grow dim, and I lose focus. And I’m a fairly disciplined guy, so it’s not a matter of my own susceptibilities. These multifunction devices, which will be a core part of our future, engender a less focused mode of reading.
    This is problematic, because as your mind wanders like a moth at a carnival after sunset, bumble-flitting from booth to booth, from light to seedy neon light, it may never return to where it began. Now, this flittering has the side benefit that if we can channel ourselves properly while reading, we’ll be able to use other applications as adjuncts to look up words or to go online and find out the hidden meanings or subtexts. But ideally all this functionality would be seamlessly present in the reading experience itself, so we wouldn’t run the risk of losing our place in the reading or our train of thought.
    So we either need better applications that keep us rooted to what we’re reading, or we need to police ourselves—perhaps with lockouts that we apply to ourselves that prohibit us from wandering out of the book to check our email or surf the web or only allow us to do this once an hour while reading. Perhaps future software updates for the iPad will allow teachers to lock devices down into ebook-only mode or give students intermittent access to the non-ebook parts of the device. Lockdown controls like this would probably be useful for a lot of adults I know too.
    Lockdown controls aren’t the only thing we could benefit from. I think we can all benefit from a brush-up course on digital hygiene, on learning how to focus. And I think we’re going to learn just how important social networks are. A 2012 study by the Association of Magazine Media showed that Gen Y was reading more magazines than ever, although this reading was tied to an increase in the use of social networking sites. So let’s face it, ebooks are going social, and it’s going to be a strange symbiosis, like that between a hummingbird