Is literature dead? Or, how to read books in the digital age

Several recent articles appearing online have pointed to a couple of burning questions about book reading in this overstuffed era: Why do people buy books they have no intention of reading? And, how can one ever find the time to read a book at all?

The first question is raised by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who claims to have come up with a metric for “the summer non-read, the book that you pick up, all full of ambition, at the beginning of June and put away, the bookmark now and forever halfway through Chapter 1, on Labor Day.”