Book Is Here

Right now you are reading, and I am writing. And whether you are reading my words on paper or on a screen, you are probably more aware of your chosen medium—more attuned to its characteristics—than the reader of almost any previous generation. Living as we do in a moment of transition, from what Adriaan van der Weel calls “the Order of the Book” to some new order (or disorder) of the digital, we have become exceptionally self-conscious readers—transforming ourselves into test subjects in our own experiments, carefully monitoring the ways our reading is changing, dutifully registering all apparent effects. We are all a bit like Nicholas Carr, who in his famous 2008 Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” described an “uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,” noting, “I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.” If we do not all draw the same conclusions as Carr, we are all asking the same questions: how is...