Reading the future: Digital books and what's to come for literature

Far from killing off the physical page, the rise of ebooks has enhanced our understanding of the written word and the people around it, says Gaby Wood.
Do we read differently now? Amid the fear and excitement of digital publishing – the panic over what it might mean for makers of books, and the exhilaration over what the gadgets can do – it seems to me that one of the most intriguing questions is whether, and how fundamentally, digitisation has altered the way we read.
Recent news that sales of printed books have plummeted in almost all markets across the world, while in the UK sales of ebooks have soared, comes on the heels of Jonathan Franzen’s alarming pronouncement at the Hay Festival Cartagena that ebooks are damaging society. But in the United States, sales of digital books have slowed. To anyone trying to read the runes of this fairly new market, it seems like a case of hearing the bad news before the bad news: either printed books are dead, or no one is reading at all.
I don’t think either of those things is true. Reading has always been extremely personal – people are fast or slow, immersive, digressive or meticulous, they like dog-eared paperbacks or first editions. Read more...