Screen reading

Reading is so much less linear now. One reason is, more and more of it is being done on screens - computer monitors, cellphones, etc. Another reason is the way it's done on-screen: hopping from one (Web) page to another and back because of hyperlinks. A third is how annotated reading is getting. We don't just read an article, play, story, etc. on screen - we also read commentary on it (what those hyperlinks link to). An example offered by the Christian Science Monitor in "How the Web changes your reading habits" is Hamletworks.org. "When completed, the site will help visitors comb through several editions of the play, along with 300 years of commentaries by a slew of scholars. Readers can click to commentaries linked to each line of text in the nearly 3,500-line play. The idea is that some day, anyone wanting to study 'Hamlet' will find nearly all the known scholarship brought together in a cohesive way that printed books cannot."