![]() ![]() In encounters with librarians, booksellers, and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife-edge. ![]() From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked. The extraordinary fact is that we don’t know which is more likely, a future offering us eons of perishing frigidity or one giving us equal expanses of steamy heat. ![]() Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English Professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated.ĭo you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. One of the worlds most beloved and best-selling writers takes his ultimate journey - into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks. ![]()
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