You are browsing this site using Internet Explorer 7. For a better experience, you may want to upgrade to a newer browser.

“You don’t need to write a novel in tweets to write a novel about the experience of living in the age of Twitter.”

(W)hat we can expect from books is what the internet has always given us. More. More of everything. But what of taking in continuous prose, in the form conventionally known as “reading”?

Yes, it’s another article about ‘the death of books’ and dwindling attention spans, but Sam Leith seems less anguished than most, and in this piece for the Guardian he touches on an interesting aspect of the rise of digital books — namely the way in which traditional book formats have come about by ‘cultural accident’, and whether emerging formats will have as profound an effect on the nature of prose narrative as have the physical constraints of conventional books.