I clearly have no qualms about reading off of a screen, but posting Junot Diaz’s improvised reading list made me think of this passage from Terrence Holt’s “Charybdis,” a short story about a troubled space mission to Jupiter:

“The computer is my timekeeper, it is my courier and library. It stores in its memory the pages I call up on the screen. For my collection I chose Shakespeare, Melville, the old myths. My crewmates left their libraries with me. Stern loved mysteries; Peterson was more a western man.

I spend hours at the screen now, and though I am grateful for the machine, it leaves me skeptical. I wish often for the weight, or at least the solidity, of a book, instead of the image of words on glass. The transience of the picture worries me, and I have caught myself calling back earlier pages, comparing them to my own memory to see if the text has been altered by the computer’s traffic with so much other information. Sometimes, I am tantalized by a suspicion—surely that word was not noses, but something starting with a g; and that was cave, not save; not screen, but—I catch myself, and read on.”