Is the death of books upon us?

[Commentary] Imagine going to the library and ending up in a museum with free wireless, and you get the picture of where the reading public is headed. Books, the kind with spines and glue, are heading for the rare manuscript collection.

The age of books is ending. Children born today will experience not the extinction of the book, per se, but the slow decline of the universal yet wonderfully idiosyncratic process of giving and receiving actual books, holding and shifting them in the lap, turning pages, and moving the eye and the mind across ink and shadow.

This communal human activity has spanned over five centuries, beginning with the invention of the Gutenberg Press and coming to rest not long after wireless technologies and e-readers started thumping their chests. My lament for a life without books stems not from mere affection for how books are made and handled, but from an appreciation for the messy tactile narrative of how books are made manifest and cling to our lives. Our treasured books hold more than dog-ears and bookmarks; they store the fragments we shore against our ruins, to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot.

[Mark Franek is the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education, in Philadelphia, and has taught English for nearly 20 years.]