> "What's been sacrificed is not reading in the most prosaic sense, but the particular experience of a certain type of reading, perilously endangered among all of us attracted to the alluring siren-call of the smartphone ping."
Product idea: I think it's just a matter of time that the basic e-reader technology will be so cheap that it should be possible to order one with a set of prepackaged books. You can read the books on the device, period. No internet, no word look-up (a dictionary can be a standalone book in the library), no highlighting / commenting, no adding or buying new books, no nothing else except the text of the books in the library. It will be so cheap that once you are done, you can just toss is out.