I have been reading a lot on my iPad recently, and I have some【46】______ （complain) —not a

I have been reading a lot on my iPad recently, and I have some【46】______ (complain) —not about the iPad itself but about the state of digital reading generally. Reading is a subtle thing, and its subtleties are artifacts of a venerable medium; words printed in ink on paper. Glass and pixels aren't the same.

When I read a physical book, I don’t have to look anywhere else to find out how much I’ve read. The iPad e-reader, iBooks, tries to create the【47】illu______of a physical book. The pages seem to turn, and I can see the edges of those.that remain, but it’s fake. There are always exactly six unturned pages, no matter【48】______ I am in the book.

Also, there is a larger problem. Books in their digital format look vastly less "finished, ”or less genuine than real books. You can vary their font and type size, but this only makes them【49】______ (resemble) word-processed manuscripts all the more. Your poems—no matter how【50】______ (wretch) or wonderful they are—will never look as good as Robert Hass’s poems in the print edition of The Apple Trees at Olema. But your poems can look almost exactly as ugly—as “e-book-like”—as the Kindle version of that collection.

All the e-books I’ve read have been ugly—books by Chang-rae Lee, Alvin Kernan, and Stieg Larsson—though the texts have been wonderful. I didn’t grow up reading texts. I grew up reading books, and this【51】______ (differ) is important.

When it comes to digital editions, the【52】______ (assume) seems to be that all books【53】are______(create) equal. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In the mass migration from print to digital, we' re seeing a profusion of digital books—many of them out of copyright—that look new and even “HD, ”but which may well have been supplanted by more accurate editions and better translations. We need a digital readers' guide—a place where readers can find【54】______whether the book they're about to download is the best available edition.

【55】Fi______, two related problems. I already have a personal library, but most of the books I’ve read have come from【56】______(lend) libraries. Barnes & Noble has released an e-reader that allows short-term【57】______(borrow) of some books. The entire idea behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first —and that only you can read it unless you want to give your reading device to someone else.

This goes against the social value of reading, the collective knowledge and【58】______ (collaborate) discourse that comes from access to【59】______ (share) libraries. This is not a good thing for readers, authors,【60】pub______or our culture in general.

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