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It’s a nice dream, and a common one: the shucking off of material possessions to achieve a purer, spiritually richer life. But there’s a deep, perhaps even tragic, flaw in [that kind of] thinking, at least when it comes to those books. [We assume] that a book remains a book when its words are transferred from printed pages to a screen. But it doesn’t. A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book - just as one reads a printed book differently than one reads a scribal book and one reads a scribal book differently than one reads a scroll and one reads a scroll differently than one reads a clay tablet.
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