My man Verlyn Klinkenborg is all, “books will endure not (just) because they look and feel beautiful, but because they don’t offer distractions—no pop-ups, games, Flash modules, interactive doohickeys and gewgaws. ‘They do nothing.’” And, as usual, I’m all, “Dog, Verlyn is my dog. He’s right.”

People tend to a) think in dichotomies and b) set up the wrong dichotomies. I’ve often overheard subway readers muttering to one another about Kindles and Nooks, books and newspapers. They see a war between tactile and visual, old and new, elegant and multitaskable. What they should see is a play of information-filtration. Who’s filtering your media, and how? Nowadays, we mostly filter our own experience with books and news. We look up what we want on Google or Amazon and read it, buy it, or rent it. TV is on demand. NetFlix has brought the movies to our computers, to our whims.

But Google sorts what we filter. (We don’t flip through hundreds of screens to find what we want, most of the time.) There are two layers here. There’s a layer of basic, molecular, robotically sorted metachoice, then a conscious level of filtration. Given options [A-Z], we pick… whatever. (*I pick Z.)

That said, yes, the (immediate) future of the book is secure for a number of reasons. At the same time, not opposed in a dichotomy, but progressing plurally alongside book-ness, we have the Library of Congress saving our tweets for posterity. So books remain, and now so do our tweets. The once-solid becomes ephemeral, but does not disappear. The ephemeral becomes, not solid, but permanent…

As an addendum, I suggest all future-readers who dig poetry sign up for Knopf’s free Poem-a-Day emails. Check out “Mirror” by Mark Strand for a taste.