Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies.

To think about the future of reading means, then, to think about the long history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read.

The original Kindle Fire

At this moment, he tells us, “I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” Augustine closes the book, marking his place with his finger, and goes to tell his friend Alypius about his experience. His conversion is complete.

Nothing is more suspect today than the book’s continued identity of being “at hand.” The spines, gatherings, threads, boards, and folds that once gave a book its shapeliness, that fit it to our hands, are being supplanted by the increasingly fine strata of new reading devices, integrated into vast woven systems of connection. If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude our grasp in some fundamental sense. What this means for how we read—and how we are taken hold of by what we read—is still far from clear.

For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure. Indeed, it is often hard to know what to call them (e-books, books, texts, or just documents) without any clear sense of the material differences between them.

• Riding a bike today isn't nearly as real as it was, what with not having to worry about your crotchal region and forearms being pounded mercilessly by the combination of solid rubber tires, no suspension system and a lack of decent pavement.
  
• Driving a car lacks the coarse physicality of driving a team of horses across dusty plains in search of a Slurpee and a pack of smokes.
• Watching a movie isn't nearly as "real" as watching a good old fashioned play, where actors were actual, physical human beings close enough to touch and/or interrupt with an ill-timed coughing fit/incoming call.
• For that matter, making an outgoing call is simply a matter of pressing some fake buttons (or simply mashing a thumb on a fake face in the Contact list). Our forearms and dialing finger have atrophied from under-use going all the way back to the days when friends with the most 0's in their numbers got the fewest calls.
• Today's cold scientific medical community, with its beeping machinery and wires everywhere can never be as real as it was in the past when the common cold was treated with a combination of leeches, heroin and a full frontal lobotomy.
  
• Firing up your local newspaper's website will never be as real as paging through the paper version, admiring the ink stains on your fingers and the box scores informing you that the game ended after press time. The website also can't offer you the physical pain of multiple scratches (picked up while retrieving the paper from your overgrown rose bush) or multiple bite wounds (picked up while retrieving the paper from your neighbor's Rottweiler-infested backyard).
• Nuking a quick meal for the kids? Get over yourself. Real people start their own fires from scratch, by doing whatever it is that Boy Scouts do to earn the "Firestarter" badge. And that Healthy Choice meal? Better get right to slaughtering your own flavorless chicken and growing some equally flavorless rice to accompany it.
• Writing an email can't possibly compare to the physical purity of placing quill to parchment and hand-scratching a lengthy URL onto it, along with "Yo, Ted. Check thiſ out."
• Buying stuff with a credit card online vs. biting gold pieces into "bits" at the trading post, online classes vs. sleeping through Philosophy in an uncomfortable chair, and etc. ad nauseaum.

As I begin to read, the kids begin to lean into me. Our bodies assume positions of rest, the book our shared column of support. No matter what advertisers say, this could never be true of the acrobatic screen. As we gradually sink into the floor, and each other, our minds are freed to follow their own pathways, unlike the prescribed pathways of the Web. We read and we drift. “The words of my book nothing,” writes Walt Whitman, “the drift of it everything.”

• Boxed wine has gained some acceptance with wine drinkers, but will a slightly smaller version of boxed wine sell well? Taking it to the next logical step, there should be "juice box" size wine boxes coming out, too. Who wants to sip wine through a tiny straw? [url]
• Some folks seem to hate plastic water bottles, so now there's a paper milk carton without milk, filled with water. Looks like ultra-skim milk -- 0% milk. [url]
• Drinking water from a paper cup is okay.. but a paper bottle? Paper water bottles haven't exactly taken over since they were introduced, so... [url]
• Coca-Cola has stopped making its 'White Christmas Cans' after a month of selling them because consumers don't like the new look of the can -- and some people think it tastes different. The white cans also look a bit too much like Diet Coke, so some drinkers are getting a few more calories than they expected. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

"The campaign will use print ads but also have a strong social media dimension -- on Facebook and YouTube -- in order to reach younger people, who tend to be printer averse, Mr. Williams said. I think it's very powerful and I think it's time and I don't apologize for the fact I think it's true and that this will resonate with young people."

Of course most people ignore those e-mail signatures (which often just exist to give a company the illusion of being "green") and print -- or don't print -- based on convenience. While the paper industry is obviously going to feel some pain from a declining newspaper industry and the rise of an ocean of portable data devices (and in turn the slow rise of that ever elusive paperless society), a clever ad campaign targeting the young and "printer reverse" isn't going to be able to change reality. What will probably wind up "resonating with young people" is the impression that Domtar and Williams are being ridiculous. Hey, maybe the problem with the fax machine industry is all just branding!