The Future of Reading

Sonia Saraiya:

What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?

One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn't like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn't get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.

But a book is a "momentary stay against confusion." This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it's rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, "That's it for being bored! Thank God! You're awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!"

More from Tom Tunguz.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at April 23, 2012 4:15 AM
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