“Reading on-screen tempts us to see things only through the pinhole of our immediate curiosity”

Reading on-screen tempts us to see things only through the pinhole of our immediate curiosity. I don’t mean to sentimentalize the Reading of Books, but as a practical matter, when you hold a book in your hands, it is very different from what happens when you are typing something onto a glassy, featureless screen. Online, your experience is personalized, but it is also atomized, flattened and miniaturized, robbed of its landscape. Physical books require you to literally hold some of the context of what you are reading, and that is a crucial dimension of understanding.

Maria Bustillos, “The Oxford English Dictionary”, The New York Times Magazine (5 July 2015), 23.