“If the pile of unread books on the bedside table is a graveyard of good intentions, the list of unread books on a Kindle is a black hole of fleeting intentions”

“The smartphone coupled with the open web creates a near-perfect container for distributing journalism at a grand scale.”

“Once bought by a reader, a book moves through a routine. It is read and underlined, dog-eared and scuffed and, most importantly, reread. To read a book once is to know it in passing. To read it over and over is to become confidants. The relationship between a reader and a book is measured not in hours or minutes but, ideally, in months and years.”

“To return to a book is to return not just to the text but also to a past self. We are embedded in our libraries. To reread is to remember who we once were, which can be equal parts scary and intoxicating. Other services such as Timehop offer ways to return to past photos or past tweets. They, too, are unexpectedly evocative. Far more so than you might think. They allow us to measure and remeasure ourselves. And if a resurfaced tweet has an emotional resonance of x, than a passage in a book by which you were once moved must resonate at 100x.”

http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/why-have-digital-books-stopped-evolving/