Five thousands years ago, humanity’s crazy adventure with writing began with us holding something small in our hands, waiting for the text to speak to us, trying to still our minds long enough to listen to the voice of another. That part, it seems, hasn’t changed.

If you even think of a historic book, you can, 24 seconds later, be peering into its opening pages. Anything written past 1923 — when copyright clamps down its nearly-deathless grip on American letters — you must pay to read. But anything before that? It’s flowing around us like a stream, to be scooped up whenever you need refreshment.

Then, as I thumbed my way through the 99% point, Tolstoy launched into yet another of his didactic, tendentious rants about the hopeless idiocy of historians.

It sits on my shelf, a little compilation of my reading and thinking — or, as I titled it, War in Pieces.

The phone offered other delights that paper couldn’t. Midway through the book, voice dictation on the iPhone started to get really, really good. I’d been doing a lot of highlighting while reading Tolstoy, saving my favorite sentences and passages. I wasn’t writing a lot of marginalia because typing on the phone broke my flow a bit too much. 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,

What happened to me with War and Peace on the phone is that precisely the same intensity of cultural purpose kicked in

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.

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.

The book becomes the diversion itself, the thing your brain is needling you to engage with.

(This idea — marrying portability with a small “screen” — is what animated Robert Fair de Graff in 1939, when he invented the “pocket book.” At a mere 4 by 6 inches, it was nearly the same size as a mobile phone, and those playful dimensions — plus the dirt-cheap price of 25 cent — kicked off an explosion of everyday reading.)

Over 15% of all books sold today are in electronic format, a fact which I have begun to regard as a tribute to the human spirit — a testament to our dogged ability to wring aesthetic joy from devices that seem specifically engineered to kill it.

Digital books, with their slithy, constantly reflowing text, create this problem every time we open them up. “The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book,” as Abigail Sellen, a digital thinker for Microsoft Research, told Scientific American, “turns out to be more important than we realized.”

Phones are an awfully ugly place to experience books.

the next minute Tolstoy would start rambling on for 5,000 words about how the idiotic punditry of historians “can only satisfy young children.” He gets so grouchy about historians that at one point he dismisses the entire project of post-Gutenbergian publishing, referring to it “that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of printed matter.” Later on, he becomes so curdled in his point-scoring and grudge-settling that he actually begins numbering his sentences.

I realized that Tolstoy has enormous, empathetic insight into the absurdities and paradoxes of the war-fighting mentality. At one point, Napoleon’s troops desperately try to impress their commander by fording a river, only to drown in the effort, while Napoleon — studying his plans on the riverbank — doesn’t even notice their efforts.

Tolstoy himself wrote about the value of mindfulness in War and Peace: “A healthy man can tear himself away from the deepest reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in and can then return again to his own thoughts.”

We break it ourselves, voluntarily, checking and rechecking Facebook the instant our mind wanders away from the plot of a novel.

On the contrary, it was reinforcing it, helping me stitch Tolstoy together. I doubt I’d have gotten half of what I got out of War and Peace without Wikipedia ready at hand. It’s hard to call that a distraction.

I quickly found myself darting over to Wikipedia every few pages, reading up on minor Russian skirmishes and historic figures

when, in the grips of some semiarchaelogical excavation of my home office (or “home” “office”, to be precise) I would find it. Then, to bury my feelings of guilt at having failed at finishing a Great Work, I’d hide it in the remote corner of a bookshelf where it would, hopefully, cease to haunt me.

the way poets wield metaphor like a blunt-force instrument,

Bob Tedeshi, “but just the thought of spending that much time squinting at a little screen makes my eyes hurt.”

Are the great works of literature doomed to fade away like ghosts?

book readers read paper much more often than digital, and these days, the number of independent bookstores is actually growing.

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.

When scientists test these things, they find that people who read a text onscreen remember less of it than people who read it on paper.