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Tolstoy’s Dictaphone (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

Sven Birkerts’ book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994), had, as its title suggests, a plaintive, mournful, elegiac tone. In a series of poignant essays, Birkerts detailed his own extensive personal reading history, and broadcast dire predictions for a culture quickly abandoning the traditional book for more passive and light- hearted electronic entertainments. He was bemoaning, not so much the loss of the book per se, but the book reader. Not so much the demise of the paper and glue artifact, as the deterioration of the cultured, interior,...

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