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

There’s concern that as reading shifts to tablet devices, reading will disappear:

“It’s like trying to cook when there are little children around,” said David Myers, 53, a systems administrator in Atlanta, who got a Kindle Fire tablet in December. “A child might do something silly and you’ve got to stop cooking and fix the problem and then return to cooking.”

“These apps beg you to review them all the time,” he said, but he remains a fan of the device.

I have concerns about reading on always-connected devices, too, but I think tablets aren’t driving a reduction in reading. That’s been a trend for a long, long time. People already don’t read and now their habits are following them to tablets.

If anything, I think tablets could be a big boost for publishers. When books are only printed-and-bound paper, you have to decide to bring a book with you wherever you’re going to read. You have to consciously plan to read, before you might have time to. Which means most people won’t. But if all of your books are on a device you bring with you most places anyway, it’s a lot easier to read for a few minutes when you have a moment. It’s possible that while reading is going to end up a much less solitary affair than we’re used to, we could read more on the whole than before, even with Twitter and Facebook and the web distracting us.