Too busy to read?

Handwritten books were rare and the purview of a very small section of society. Getting access to them was complicated--you ... The printing press acted as a catalyst to accelerate the process of obtaining knowledge. There was now a repeatable process for copying knowledge: books. These books were cheaper and faster to make than the old manuscripts, and thus were more widely available.

Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 new products.

A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas.

Historically, the ultimate brain extenders were books, keeping track of centuries' worth of collected knowledge that we can access when we need it. Perhaps they still are.

Books about success can be somewhat useful. But for marketing reasons, a typical book is focused on a single topic to make it easier to sell and packed with filler to get the page count up. No one has time to sort through that much filler.

A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten. As Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

Libraries (as well as many individuals) aren't eager to relinquish old-fashioned ink-on-paper editions, because the printed book is by far the most durable and reliable long-term storage technology we have. Printed books require no mediating device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence.

I think the real reason why e-books gave me a sense of unease, though, was not because they lack the appeal of paper as much as the fact that they simply can't be stacked up after reading. I owned an enormous number of books that I had thought I liked and collected, only to realize that I just picked them up for the sake of appearance. I wanted people to see them and be impressed by what a person of depth I was and how thirsty I must have been for knowledge. It's clear now that I wanted to convey to others what a worthy person I was through my books. For that purpose, they absolutely had to be piled up in stacks as I finished reading them. Anyone who sees a pile of books will think that you've read a lot. I felt uneasy about e-books because it would only look like I'd read a single book regardless of how many thousands of works I'd gone through.