The best case I’ve seen for electronic books, however, arrived
just last month, on the Web site of The New York Review of Books. The
novelist Tim Parks proposed that e-books offered “a more austere, direct
engagement” with words. What’s more, no dictator can burn one. His
persuasive bottom line: “This is a medium for grown-ups.”
...
The smartphone has clearly been recent technology’s greatest gift to
literacy. Carrying one obliterates one’s greatest fear: of being trapped
somewhere — a train, the D.M.V., a toilet — with nothing whatsoever to
read.
Most of what I devour on my phone is journalism: out-of-town newspapers
and links gleaned from Twitter and Facebook. Ben Franklin would have
liked this palm-size medium. He’s the founding father who said, “Read
much, but not too many books.”
... Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the
largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my
shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened to Saul Bellow’s
“Herzog” this way. The shirt pocket method is better than using ear
buds, which block out the natural world. My wife tucks her phone into
her bra, on long walks, and listens to Dickens novels. I find this
unbearably sexy.
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