CLICK & JANE

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN writing in The New York Times.
Published: January 30, 2009

“Did you like this book?” asks the computer. It’s a customer-satisfaction question, but it seems more profound than that.

We hesitate. Ben, my 3-year-old son, shoots me a puzzled look. The answer should be yes. Ben enjoys what’s on the screen right now: Starfall, an online medley of free learn-to-read activities. But he doesn’t like the question.
“It’s not a book,” he explains, emphatically, to the laptop. “It’s more like a movie or a video.”
Oh, God. I knew it.
In a hundred ways, we pretend that screen experiences are books — PowerBooks, notebooks, e-books — but even a child knows the difference. Reading books is an operation with paper. Playing games on the Web is something else entirely. I need to admit this to myself, too. I try to believe that reading online is reading-plus, with the text searchable, hyperlinked and accompanied by video, audio, photography and graphics. But maybe it’s just not reading at all. Just as screens aren’t books.

Read Heffernan's piece in full here.