Julie Vick DOES NOT want to talk with you.

...Now I do most of my reading electronically, and I’ve never had a stranger ask what I was reading on my e-reader or phone. Literary dialogue has transformed into a sloppy spaghetti of Facebook comments and Twitter feeds in which you do connect with others, only in the most surface of ways.

The last time I talked with a stranger about my reading was in a Denver coffee shop a couple of years ago. As I sat grading a stack of papers, a young man waiting for his order asked me how my students were faring. “Not too bad,” I told him.

“I always wanted to teach writing,” he said before he picked up his coffee and left. Soon after, I started grading all my papers online.

I’m not really one to wax poetic about the disappearance of printed books — I don’t love the way they smell or feel. Moving toward e-books has mostly spelled convenience for me — it’s easier to bring a stack of books on a trip and my bookshelf only has to be big enough to hold the few physical books I love. But now when I grab lunch and open the Kindle app on my phone, I dive into a maze of words in which the only threats of interruption are electronic.