The Age of Reading Isn't Over

Not quite 2,300 years ago, but more like 17 years ago, the story goes, the executives of Barnes & Noble asked their engineers to build a device that could hold every book ever printed.

The company, which had spent a century filling oak shelves one store at a time, envisioned a library small enough to slip into a coat pocket yet vast enough to safeguard the sum total of a reader's collection. ...