SOURCE: "Are There Books in Our Future?," in The New York Times Book Review, December 18, 1994, p. 14.

In the following review, Sharratt exposes several assumptions that inform Birkerts's analysis of reading in The Gutenberg Elegies.

Major historical transformations can be imagined most poignantly as parental anxieties. Any book-loving parent today contemplating a 5-year-old daughter absorbed in the first magic of solo reading can whisk forward to her teen and college years, vicariously re-anticipating that first full encounter with Austen, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann—only to halt this nostalgic rerun in sudden recognition of an alternative possible scenario: of a generation by then so enmeshed in electronic information, so tuned in not just to television but to pervasive interactive multimedia, so besotted by on-line data services, as to have grown up barely acquainted with printed books at all, except as museum exhibits or as unwelcome inherited wallpaper.

This worry is the...