Casey Newton on the future of reading:
Today Borders has been liquidated, the location I used to visit replaced by an electronics store. Between the web and social media, I read more than I ever have — and yet I read fewer books than ever. Reading over all my notes about the future of reading, I see I have reported it out of hope that books will evolve to repair what other technologies have started to break: my ability to concentrate over hundreds of pages. I think of a line from The Tender Bar, by J. R. Moehringer: “‘Every book is a miracle,’ Bill said. ‘Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly — and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake — and tried to tell us the rest of the story.”
I’ve never actually read The Tender Bar — I just saw that when someone shared a screenshot of the passage on Twitter.
neumatikos 