The cheery news from the publishing world is that sales of books — actual hardcover books — were way up during 2020. The cheerless news from the retail world is that sales in physical bookstores plummeted. I’ll mourn if the stores die, for we’ll lose the excitement of browsing and the unexpected stumble upon a new and exciting volume.
But the steadiness of hardcover sales, even if buyers seem to be flocking to the familiar rather than searching for the new, is an important marker for the proposition that all is not lost.
How important? Consider a just-released study by the linguist Naomi Baron, who created a stir with her fine 2015 book "Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World.” There she argued that the move from print to digital was causing a variety of harms. Baron’s most recent paper reviews the literature on how digital devices affect our cognitive function — and her conclusions are depressing.