A Different Kind Of Reading

Publishers Weekly:

Forgive me for starting out all high-falutin', but an anecdote I heard about the late, great critic Susan Sontag makes for a good way into this consideration of four new, enhanced e-books.

A decade ago, Sontag was walking with a friend through the glowing, neon streets of Tokyo, a place like a series of contiguous Times Squares, when she suddenly looked up at the endlessly distracting electric city and exclaimed in dismay, "It's the end of reading!"

Sontag, one of the great advocates of the written word, unknowingly anticipated the fear of many book lovers about the dawning of digital books: will reading on screens, our e-books spliced with video, links, and other gizmos, turn the concentrated act and escape of reading into something diluted and distracting?

Based on four just-released enhanced e-books from HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Hyperion, that's not likely to happen. ...