The New York Times, on the advent of e-readers

As always, I am reading several books at a time — actually, several stacks. One is the stack of heirloom books by my bed, which begins with the engaging and soon-to-be-published "Camel" by Robert Irwin and works haphazardly outward to Rose Macaulay's "The Towers of Trebizond" and Bronislaw Malinowski's "A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term."

And then there is a virtual stack of e-books. There is Alvin Kernan's "Crossing the Line," which I'm reading on my laptop via ebrary. I'm using other e-book software, like Kindle for the Mac and Stanza. My iPad is on its way.

In one way or another, I've been reading on a computer ever since it meant looking at green phosphor pixels against a black background. And I love the prospect of e-reading — the immediacy it offers, the increasing wealth of its resources. But I'm discovering, too, a hidden property in printed books, one of the reasons I will always prefer them. They do nothing.

I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper. But what I really love is their inertness. No matter how I shake "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," mushrooms don't tumble out of the upper margin, unlike the "Alice" for the iPad. I never have the lingering sense that there is another window open behind page 133 of "the lives and times of archy and mehitabel." I can tell the weather from these books only by the way their pages curl when it's hot and humid.

And more. There is never a software glitch, like the one that keeps me from turning the page in ebrary. And there's nothing meta about the metadata of real books. You can't strip away details about the printing of the book — copyright information, place and date of publication — without actually tearing off the binding, title page, half-title and colophon. The book is the book, whereas, in electronic formats, the book often seems to be merely the text.

A paper book aids my concentration by offering to do nothing else but lie open in front of me, mute until I rest my eyes upon it. It won't search for a flight or balance my checkbook or play an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" or catch up on Google Reader. It won't define a word, unless the book happens to be a lexicon or have a glossary.

The truth is that I need that help to keep reading, especially as much as I always have. The question isn't what will books become in a world of electronic reading. The question is what will become of the readers we've been — quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted — in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore.