I work in the used and rare book trade, which means I am surrounded by books. All day, every day, all kinds of books are bought and sold out of my office. Naturally, I have to at least dip into quite of few of these, and it seems one book always leads to another—sometimes I am compelled to further research a particular author or title or history. My home, too, is full of books, and I am constantly using them to check a reference, refresh a memory, answer a question. Yet, at present, I am pressed to tell you what I’ve been reading lately.

Perhaps I’ve been reading too many things. I’m halfway through a month-old issue of The New Yorker. As is my habit, I’m alternating between a few different collections of short stories (Poe, Lorrie Moore, Delmore Schwartz). Doctorow’s Homer and Langley has been living in my bag for the past two weeks, because I seem to read it only on the subway. That’s just my spare time reading. Strange as it feels for a bookdealer to admit it, lately the bulk of my reading happens on a screen.

And plenty of readers, bibliophiles in particular and myself included, are wary of this. Every day I read someone weighing in on GoogleBooks, or e-readers, or a library digitization project—and how any or all of it affects publishing, bookselling, reading and thought. Some suspect that reading online has adverse effects on our attention spans. Some express caution regarding the accuracy, inclusiveness, and limitations of digital cataloguing projects. Aesthetes scoff at electronic ink. Critics bemoan that throwing an e-reader against a wall is a much more expensive (and, perhaps, thusly more sincere) display of disgust than throwing a paperback (the same goes for spills, loans, and the rigging of a wobbly table).

I believe in hard copy. The first edition of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is remarkably different from later printings (several passages had to be re-written after a woman sued, claiming defamation of character), and without remaining copies of the first printing, this bit of literary history might be lost. Kindle owners had their George Orwell titles taken from them with a flick of Big Brother’s switch. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was subject to numerous editorial suggestions and revisions by her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, something we are able to continue studying even today because the original handwritten manuscript survives. Perhaps this is the drive behind selling and collecting books, this feeling that they are important as objects.

All that being said, an e-reader does have some attractive pull. Much as I love books, I love them primarily because I love to read them. When I travel, the hardest decision I have to make is which books to bring and which to leave behind. I suffer intense library separation anxiety. So, an experiment: I have upcoming holiday travel plans, and here is a conservative (I swear) list of what I’d like to bring. I include the page count and format to provide some idea of the book’s size and weight:

It’s worth noting that I already own all of these books, and that the most recent title (Snow) was published in 2004. A quick search of a few recent titles shows that most current bestsellers are all available for e-readers, but they simply aren’t what I want to read. True, an e-reader would provide instant gratification if I finished one book and wanted to begin another—or even if I simply got bored, or my mood changed. Some e-readers come with built-in dictionaries. I love dictionaries! Might not the temptation of instant gratification bring me right back to my current predicament, reading too much to relay it all?

Philip Roth believes that the book cannot compete with the screen—the movie screen, the television screen, the computer screen—and that within 25 years the novel will be a "cultic" minority enthusiasm. "To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by—it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities."¹ I find this pompous and pessimistic, but it’s an echo of the idea that new reading technologies are changing the way we read. "[W]hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles," Nicholas Carr states in The Atlantic.² (More than lamenting the distraction offered by advertisements and hyperlinks—though he does mention it—Carr asks some fascinating questions about what the internet may be doing to our brains.)

So: The way we read is changing. Perhaps, too, what we read is changing—novels and long works of non-ficiton being replaced by online articles and essays, for example. All of this intersects publishing and bookselling, two tremendous influences on the literary landscape.

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