As a society, we devote ever less time to reading printed words, and even when we do read them, we do so in the busy shadow of the Internet. “Already,” the literary critic George Steiner wrote in 1997, “the silences, the arts of concentration and memorization, the luxuries of time on which ‘high reading’ depended are largely disposed.” But “these erosions,” he continued, “are nearly insignificant compared with the brave new world of the electronic.”26
