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You're listening to Away with Words. I'm Grant Barrett. And I'm Martha Barnett.

Recently I was on a long, long flight.

And I caught myself passing the time by looking around to see what all my seatmates were reading.

And it's funny how much we know or we think we know about the stranger next to us based on the book he's reading.

And to some extent, you know, we do judge a person by their book covers.

And the writer Megan Dowm has a wonderful essay about this.

She writes about how we do evaluate people to some extent depending on for

example whether you see them with the tell-tale orange spine that denotes a

Penguin paperback or the FOIL embossed dead giveaway of a romance novel.

But you know, Grant, I'm hearing a lot of hype these days about electronic books.

And I keep thinking, if everybody's carrying e-books and laptops,

we're not going to have that same simple pleasure of just looking

around a public place to see what other people are up to in terms of what they're reading.

You could just ask though if you see somebody that's true.

Who says technology is impersonal?

Well, right, I mean if you see somebody with one of the

Sony products that they have with the electronic paper or the Amazon Kendall or or any of those kinds of even reading on their palm pilot you could always ask if they're really engrossed.

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