In a recent Random House blog essay, writer and bookseller Fiona Ducan argues that “we read more, and in more ways, than ever, and this is thanks to all the book-killing culprits” online.

books and devices on the #2 uptown, via flickr

She also makes a great point about how thinking about books as technology lets us see their value more clearly, and think more usefully about how printed and digital media can coexist in the future:

Literary types privilege the book as the ultimate form for reading. To privilege the book as reading, though—to forget that it is a technology—is analogous to forgetting one has a body (something lit types are also wont to do), and to forget one has a body is to let it soften and lay to waste. When you recognize the book as technology, you realize that print and screen, like body and mind, are not mutually exclusive mediums, but that they are increasingly mutually influencing.