Technological innovations regarding writing—the typewriter, the electric typewriter, the computer and all its word-processing tools—have been about removing impediments to publishing one’s words. But they all have, until now, stopped short of the actual act of publishing. The line between writing and talking has also been blurred, and we can imagine that the line between talking and thinking will be, too, at some point.

And if its appearance on Twitter equals being published, do I even have the rights to it anymore?

I thought it was ready to be published, which it was.

A day or two later I assembled the tweets, revised them into a short essay, and sent them out for publication.

the idea of writing in public seemed like it would force me toward a further understanding.

But could Twitter possibly be productive, beyond the basic act of publicizing what you have written and/or proving that you still exist?I hadn’t thought so, until I composed a short piece, something between a journal entry and a personal essay, in a series of tweets.

Part of me thinks that having these scraps, these false starts, these isolated phrases, find their way into the public domain at the time they were written would have diminished the impetus of, say, Sylvia Plath or John Cheever, to do the work that has made so much of their ephemera fascinating in the first place.

The editor Ted Solotaroff wrote an essay called “A Few Good Voices In My Head,” in which he talked about managing this feeling of having an audience.

Writing on Twitter brings the energy of a début to every phrase. You could say it imbues writing with a sense of performance

more and more, we think in public. For writers, this is an especially strange development.

One of the chief delights of living in the future, as we do, is that many of the world’s big, historic books are in the public domain and have been scanned by the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, or Google Books.

But no. I was wrong. I arrived at these paragraphs …

But once the voice dictation became fluid, I quickly discovered I could highlight a cool passage and then dash off a paragraph of my own observations, dictating it like Henry James to his secretaries.

But what happens if we treat digital screens with the same romance, the same intensity of focus? Studies suggest that the cognitive distinctions go away: We learn just as much, and retain just as much, as we do on paper. As the journalist Ferris Jabr reported in Scientific American, the intellectual differences between paper and bytes may lie in our attitude towards them. When we believe that reading on a phone is equally “serious” as reading on paper, we internalize that reading just as deeply.

Some new research into the nature of reading suggests an intriguing reason we remember more from print books than digital ones: It’s because we expect print to be intellectually engaging. We approach it with an orientation that “this is serious business,” in a way that we don’t when we read on a screen.

Swiping through such small chunks of text seemed less intimidating, and more suited to the ten-minute-long bursts of reading I’d fit into interstitial moments. Because I was carrying the book around all the time, I pulled it out all the time: On the subway, walking down the block to get groceries.

But the truth is, a small page filled with relatively few words is what books often looked like, back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Check out this page from Conjectures on Original Composition, a book from 1759 by the English poet Edward Young:

I tend to blow up the text into a big font, so a page has only a few hundred words on it. Friends would often peer at my screen and wonder, doesn’t it drive you nuts to read such a big book in such tiny driblets?

Today’s digital books do not give you the nearly-sensual, visual sense of “where” something is in a book. We remember bits of a book not just by the words, but how they looked on the page — where they were located, how our hands lay next to them.

Bookmakers have spent hundreds of years patiently tweaking their design for maximum usability and loveliness.

Or, as Tolstoy puts it in one lovely metaphor:

In 1846, Edgar Allan Poe complained that modern life made long, sustained attention impossible; one could only read in short chunks. “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression —for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed,” he wrote.

But as science-of-attention researchers like Gloria Marks have found, the bigger problem is self-interruption.

In this case, though, my back-and-forth flipping between browser and phone wasn’t eroding my ability to understand the book. On the contrary, it was reinforcing it

I studied English at the University of Toronto back in the 80s and early 90s, where I discovered I really loved the compression of poems

I wanted to find out. So I did an experiment. I pulled out my iPhone and downloaded the hugest, weightiest tome I could think of. War and Peace.

I wanted to find out. So I did an experiment. I pulled out my iPhone and downloaded the hugest, weightiest tome I could think of. War and Peace.

If you assume, as Baron does, that in the decades to come books will migrate more and more to screens — screens that more suited to skimming and tweet-authoring than intensive reading

It may also be, as the scholar Anne Mangen has found in her work, that our minds are slightly befuddled by navigating ebooks. When you can’t as easily flip through a text, you feel more at sea.

In her new book Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, the linguist Naomi Baron surveyed the research and concluded that digital screens are pretty lousy environments for deep, immersive reading.