Screen, backlit, black letters on a dazzling white screen, pretty sure it's making me blind, unlike real reading in so many ways...
The screen, for example, 95% light, 5% dark lettering, often other distracting ads, colors, copy. The experience - intended to mimic reading, instead mocks it, scatterbrained ideas scattershot into your brain, always geared to the shortest possible attention span, the clicking from one uncompleted idea to another, becoming broadly informed about nothing as opposed to deeply informed about anything. This is the way of the future.
Then take the printed word, softer, all of it, reflected light, the brightness dulled by the fibres of the page, the pigments in the ink, hundreds of lumens less than the dullest computer monitor, laptop, cell-phone, bookmarks in pages, underlined passages, they will be revisited, found again, contrast this to your list of internet favorites, shortcuts, the hundreds of bookmarks that you've never returned to, that you likely never will, and by the time you get around to it the pages will have invariably expired or moved on.
Reflected, reflective words, your mind reasons as you read, the screen hypnotizes you, slips things past your conscious mind, bombards you with contrary, contradictory information and sets your mind at odds with itself, the backlit alphabet dumbs us down. The words disappear, they were never there, only the spaces around them, the phosphor, lumens of the screen obliterating them, you make sense in the negative spaces, compare this to ink, upon paper, an additive process, the words, the sentences, paragraphs and plots remain, time will decay them as well but at an infinitely slower pace, the plots, characters, themes, the turn of the phrase, they all carry on in memory.
I need to read more books.