📚Vertical reading and horizontal reading

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction talks about challenges of long form reading and erosion of focus in the age of screens.

As reading materials—not just books, but newspapers, magazines, and ephemera—proliferated, more recent centuries saw the rise of reading “extensively”: we read these materials once, often quickly, and move on. Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface.

Books offer vertical engagement — a self-contained, coherent experience that the fragmented, screen-based world cannot replicate which we get with extensive reading on social media, web or other places.