“Reading” is, after all, not a virtue in itself. Reading is simply an action that makes use of an evolving set of technologies – fundamentally, the alphabet, or whichever writing system it is that your culture happens to have acquired, but also the codex, paper, the printing press, the digital screen. Writing stuff down and having people capable of reading it is incredibly useful for disseminating information. And when a text is set down – visible, visual, rereadable, comparable with other texts – it opens up a wealth of remarkable intellectual, artistic, social and political opportunities. And yet I can imagine long-ago sticklers for tradition, around the time some bright spark was using new tech to consign the Homeric epics to papyrus, bemoaning the fact that the alphabet was destroying a creative culture of orality, memory and improvisation.