From The American Scholar: Sven Birkerts on Reading in a Digital Age.

I ask my students about their reading habits, and though I’m not surprised to find that few read newspapers or print magazines, many check in with online news sources, aggregate sites, incessantly. They are seldom away from their screens for long, but that’s true of us, their parents, as well.

But how do we start to measure effects—of this and everything else? The outer look of things stays much the same, which is to say that the outer look of things has not caught up with the often intangible transformations. Newspapers are still sold and delivered; bookstores still pile their sale tables high. It is easy for the critic to be accused of alarmism. And yet . . .