“While Amazon announced last week that it now sells more e-books than printed ones, plenty of readers still prefer the old-fashioned printed page to an electronic screen, and for good reason,” says Andrew Irvine in a column for the Edmonton Journal called “Why books will survive.”

Not that Irvine is exactly anti-technology. Still, he says, “there’s still a case to be made for the paperbound book.”

Even more important for most users is the value books have for concentrating the mind. Now that we have them, iPads and PlayBooks in some form or another won’t soon disappear. But just as television didn’t replace radio, and radio didn’t replace the newspaper, modern technology will never replace the traditional book.

Imagine trying to read a book cover-to-cover if it were printed in the format of a traditional newspaper. Books have evolved as they have to enable readers to read book-sized chunks of material.

In contrast to the traditional book, an iPad contains too much information. It gives the user too many options. Rather than asking the reader to focus on a single work, it invites us to participate in any number of unrelated activities. Why read when you can play a game, watch a video, do a puzzle or pay your bills?

Browsers allow users to browse. Books allow readers to read. Reading requires concentration. It asks us to focus our attention on a single author’s voice. It demands that we disentangle ourselves from YouTube.