Innovation will always impact our culture. Since reading is a part of humanity, the same rule applies. Technology has had an immeasurable impact on reading. It’s taken us from handwriting to the printing press to electronic readers.

Amazon was founded on books. Founder Jeff Bezos, now the richest man in the world, realized that books had the highest variability of products. Not to mention, he could easily stack them in warehouses, catalog them on his website, and ship them—OK, maybe not easily, but easier than most products starting out.

Technology has advanced how students learn how to read. Textbooks are no longer just handed down from year to year with inappropriate doodles in the margins—they’re now shared electronically so that students can interact while they learn. Libraries are no longer constrained to just physical books. They can loan out digital copies, too, and reach a wider audience than before.

Perhaps more than anything else, technology has connected readers and given us a wider community of people to share and learn with. Even if readers are a solitary bunch, they can still find endless online forums and social networks of people just like them. It’s never been easier to share your thoughts and feelings about what you’ve read with the world. Or to hear what other people had to say about their reading experience, too.

In his 2010 book The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, David Ulin says that “literature doesn’t have the influence it once did… [and] technology is the problem.” He argues that technology insists that we speed up—conversely, reading compels us to slow down. Technology distracts us—reading demands that we concentrate.

Thanks to technology, information to read is no longer in short supply. Instead, readers seek out experiences. We want to hear stories that change the way we think about certain things. And although reading is essentially just gathering information, it’s also about a deeper experience.

In 2008, the average American consumed about 100,000 per day. That’s the equivalent of a 300-page book. (Global Information Industry Center). But because we’re getting that in bits and pieces flying at us at 100 mph, we get reading whiplash and information overload. This stresses the importance of traditional reading disconnected from technology. It’s “impossible to forget, thus impossible to remember.” (Ulin)

According to Seth Lerer’s TED Talk on the history of reading, “technologies of reading… provide culture with metaphors of understanding.” In fact, the advancement of reading technologies has allowed information to spread so freely and given us the connected world that we live in today.