A long time ago, back at the dawn of the Internet, when I worked at Radio Liberty in Prague, my colleague Alexander Genis and I argued on air about the future of the art of reading, and, incidentally, writing, in the era of personal computers and the World Wide Web. Since then, history has partly judged us: we were both wrong, although, sad as it is to admit, I was more wrong. The content of the conversation was briefly as follows.
