TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Christina Rosen, commenting on screen reading:

With a wirelessly connected Kindle or iPhone, or your Wi-Fi–enabled computer, you exist in a perpetual state of potential consumerism. To be sure, for most people reading has never been a pure, quasi-monastic activity; everyday life has always presented distractions to the person keen on losing herself in a book. But for the first time, thanks to new technologies, we are making those distractions an integral part of the experience of reading. Embedded in these new versions of the book are the means for constant and elaborate demands on our attention. And as our experience with other screen media, from television to video games to the Internet, suggests, such distractions are difficult to resist.

That’s why I am skeptical of new forms of “books,” that integrate new kinds of content into them, and especially opposed to book concepts that try to make them into an experience. Books are not, and were never intended to be, an experience; they are supposed to be the means by which we expand our own minds, taking the author’s words and building on top of them with our imagination. That’s a profoundly important skill, and one we will certainly miss if we move toward reading as an immersive experience.

The stories we read, and most remember, are as much the author’s creation as our own.