Africa, the world's second-largest continent, speaks over two thousand languages but rarely translates itself. it is no wonder, therefore, that Ferdinand Oyono's francophone African classic Une vie de boy (1956), translated into at least twelve European and Asian languages, exists in only one African translation—that is, if we consider as non-African Oyono's original French and the English, Arabic, and Portuguese into which it was translated. Since 1963, when Obi Wali stated in his essay “The Dead End of African Literature” that African literature in English and French was “a clear contradiction, and a false proposition,” like “Italian literature in Hausa” (14), the question of the language of African literature has animated debate. Two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o restated Wali's contention, asserting that European languages led to African “spiritual subjugation” (9). Ngũgĩ argued strongly that African literature should be written in African languages. On the other hand, Chinua Achebe defended European languages, maintaining that they could “carry the weight of African experience” (62).

In 1979 the publishing house mladinska knjiga released the slovene translation of ferdinand oyono's une vie de boy (1956) as Življenje hišnega služabnika. The book appeared largely as a result of an order “from above” in what was then Yugoslavia, mandating publication of texts by writers from Nonaligned Movement (NAM) countries. Marjana Samide, the translator, had previously translated From a Crooked Rib (1970), by the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah (Upognjeno rebro [1978]), and she was given Une vie de boy by a Mladinska knjiga series editor because both authors, Farah and Oyono, were from Africa, seen evidently as a unitary place.

Each new technology may be janus-faced, potentially improving and degrading the human condition. The steam engine made industrial products cheaper and more diverse but contributed to the exploitation of child labor and proliferation of squalid urban living conditions. The automobile makes transportation more convenient but pollutes and leads to countless highway deaths. Calculators let anyone perform feats of math but have weakened basic arithmetic skills.

A related conundrum holds true for technologies of the written word. The printing press helped spread literacy but shook the foundations of the Catholic Church. Word processing enabled the Japanese to generate text without producing each kanji stroke by stroke, but now many Japanese find themselves forgetting the stroke order. The spelling checkers in word-processing programs monitor typographical errors but dampen motivation to master spelling.

Information and communication technologies have generated new platforms on which to read. The list includes desktop and laptop computers, e-readers (such as the Kindle and Nook), tablet computers (e.g., the iPad), and handheld devices (e.g., the iPod Touch, mobile phones). But does reading on these devices differ from reading in hard copy? If so, does our growing dependence on reading onscreen contribute to a redefinition of what it means to read?

Like eyes that looked on Wastes—
Incredulous of Ought
But Blank—and steady Wilderness—
Diversified by Night—

Just Infinites of Nought—
As far as it could see—
So looked the face I looked upon—
So looked itself—on Me—

I offered it no Help— Because the Cause was Mine—
The Misery a Compact
As hopeless—as divine—

Neither—would be absolved—
Neither would be a Queen
Without the Other—Therefore—
We perish—tho' We reign—
—Emily Dickinson, poem 693

Herman Melville, Anne Carson, and Emily Dickinson. These authors' bits of language just claimed me as I stared at some books on my office shelf, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of these passages except that I like them. So I'm listing them for you. You might also like them. I like many things, and in no particular order. For instance, here's what I “liked” one day, not long ago, on Facebook: a picture of the word Puppies! scrawled on a sidewalk; a New York Times story about the disorganization of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 (that war has a huge, nearly comical significance in my adopted country of Canada—did you know that Canadians burned down the White House?); an audio clip of Justin Bieber, featuring Busta Rhymes, singing “Little Drummer Boy”; my friend and colleague Jordan Stein's “vegan homo Thanksgiving” photo album; a posting by my “friend” “Emily Dickinson”; numerous updates about and images of the November 2011 pepper spraying of protesting students on the University of California, Davis, campus. I could go on and on, which is probably one of the reasons I, and millions of others, go on and on Facebook. Disorderly is the right word, but the likes are not quite random. People have generated these items, these virtual objects of interest, for rapid public consumption and, with the ubiquity of the “Like” button, for rapid public response. They (we) put stuff out there in part because we're showing off our preferences, or if not our preferences (even though they will be acknowledged with our liking) then at least things that interest us and (we hope) others. It's hard to know exactly what liking something on Facebook means because a like is nearly the same thing as an acknowledgment, something that says, “Yes, I clicked on this item, and it did not displease me.” And often people complain in comments that they wish there were variations on the “Like” button (“I want to express my anger with this piece of information—I wish there were a ‘Hate’ button”). Whatever our motivations or the nature of our interest in what we curate for the world on Facebook, these objects for consumption often go under the heading of like; so, like it or not, we're reading for like—we're doing a little like reading.

WHAT ARE WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE STATE OF READING? AND WHAT DO WE HOPE TO LEARN FROM THE Answers to that question? Confirmation of deeply held prejudices, or a better understanding of what reading means in digital cultures? We need to pose those questions right up front because the debate about the state of reading has been precipitated by the increasing ubiquity of the e-book, even though reading culture has been undergoing massive infrastructural changes for over a decade in the United States. The public discourse on the state of reading and on whether it has a viable future has focused on the future of the book and of literary reading now that e-books have apparently changed everything. The state of reading, as such, is not at stake because it doesn't seem likely that firemen from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will be swinging by your place anytime soon to torch your books and replace them with a well-appointed wall screen, eliminating reading forever in favor of mindless viewing. People will keep reading, if only to take in the endless text that comes at them on their various screens, from the ones on the wall to the ones they carry around with them everywhere on their portable devices. Try looking at those screens without reading. No, it's clear from the assumptions that underpin the end-is-near pronouncements about the e-book that there's reading and then there's reading and that when people talk about the future of reading, they're worried about whether readers worthy of the name will continue reading literary fiction in the twenty-first century. But that isn't a very interesting question because it imagines the act of reading in such an ahistorical manner, curled up in a well-upholstered time warp, far from the unruliness of contemporary reading cultures.

Interface, we think, is the screen, the display, the portal into the online world or computer. The GUI (Graphical User Inter-face), with its menu bars and navigational buttons, is so familiar that we tend to overlook the “gooeyness” of it—the mutable, mediating activity—and take interface for a thing, static, stable, and fixed. Or we take it as a representation of computational processes, a convenient translation of what is “really going on” inside. Neither could be further from actuality.

What if in the final minutes of your heavying
descending

the landing strip kept lying
changing you back
into the air the way a white

backs away in anger when you approach with the directions you've been asked?
—Ed Roberson, “The Aerialist Narratives”

The fate of the nation is foretold in the arcs of birds, in the flight patterns of the ruling class, in the strip of runway hard to see in the fog. Only through the scrutiny of all such lines will our fates grow clear.

—Joseph Donahue, “Metaphysical Shivers: Reading Ed Roberson”

Any analysis of reading today must consider contemporary writing practices. The epochal shift from print to digital texts has been under way for some time. Indeed, print books are now so interpenetrated with digital media at every stage of their production that they may more appropriately be considered an output form of digital texts than a separate medium. Much has been written about the end of books, but, as Alan Liu observes, they have been deconstructed almost from the beginning, from the remixing of Bible excerpts according to the liturgical calendar to the experimental fiction of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (“End” 509-11). This tradition notwithstanding, Jessica Pressman correctly detects in some contemporary novels anxiety about the continued life of books and a desire to reassert the book's authority in the face of the exponential expansion of the Web and the ongoing conversion of books into digitized texts, including the several million now available at Google Books and other online venues.

It is often said that proper reading relies on the art of taking a pause: On our abilityto suspend the pressing rhythms of the everyday and allow ourselves to absorb, and be absorbed by, alternative structures of temporality. The clocks of the imagination do not run at the same speeds as the timetables of the real; to read is to inhabit the present at one's own pace and in the light of a multitude of unknown pasts and possible futures. Recent years have witnessed a swell in publications pondering the state of reading in our world of instant connectivity and shrinking attention spans. In one of these books, Jane Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize winner, considers the peculiar acts of writing and reading a novel as profound contributions to the process of enlightenment—a kind of enlightenment enlightened about itself and no longer repressing the other of reason: “The way in which novels are created—someone is seized by inspiration and then works out his inspiration methodologically by writing, observing, writing, observing, thinking through, and writing again—is by nature deliberate, dominated neither by reason nor by emotion” (176). According to Smiley, the act of reading a novel re-creates an author's deliberate negotiation of affect and rationality. As readers follow the lines of a (good) book, they remain in relative control over the speed of their reading, able to pause when necessary, to hasten forward when desiring so, to reread passages at their leisure, and to close the pages of the book when overtaken by exhaustion. Good stories rely on intricate plot constructions and narrative tensions, but they also situate readers as subjects freed from the temporal determination and ideological drive of other time-based media. Good books can certainly move readers, but—following Smiley's logic—they will not curtail a reader's freedom to move along the text at his or her own speed, and hence they will allow this reader to simultaneously bring into play emotion and reason, the absorptive and the distant.

Reading isn't what it was. As we enter the “late age of print,” E-Books are still less common than “P-Books” (printed books), but the balance is quickly changing, especially in the world of academic publishing (Striphas xii). While many lament the loss of the p-book's materiality, texts have become more lively as a result of digitization: textual-production platforms like blogging let writers and readers interact with each other and create intimate social relationships. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick found while writing her book Planned Obsolescence using CommentPress, an online platform that enables readers' commenting, writing can become a more social and creative process when done in dialogue with readers. This turn to the social in writing parallels a turn to the social in media generally. Thus, it makes sense to evaluate not how far our devices are taking us from paper—the answer is already pretty far—but rather how digital media are creating new social valences of reading.