The Future of Reading

What does the emergence of e-readers mean for writers, for storytelling, for the place of fiction in the cultural landscape? Author Paul Theroux says that e-books seem “magical” to him, but that something is lost when we give up the “physicality” of a book–and how one makes a book their own by reading it, writing in the margins, dog-earing the corners, and living with it as an object. “The greatest loss is the paper archive,” he says. “No more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.”