The future of reading

In Stanislas Dehaene’s recent book, Reading in the Brain, the conclusive chapter, titled “The Future of Reading,” begins with the following historic quote from Abraham Lincoln:

Writing – the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye – is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conceptions of it – great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions.