Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Galleycat reports on comments made by Steve Jobs earlier this week at Macworld Expo. Basically, Jobs doesn’t think much of the Kindle design-wise (which, coming from the man behind the iPod, makes sense). But Jobs also makes some comments about people and reading (saying, basically, that they don’t read). And yet, while studies like the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” and “To Read or Not to Read” certainly point towards disturbing trends, when people go to a website, they’re reading. As “point and click” as the Internet is, you can’t get very far without doing a fair amount of text consumption. After all, the online world doesn’t look like a sheet of Ikea instructions, with nothing by symbols and diagrams. And while it may not be Wordsworth, it’s still words.