We have a crisis on our hands. You mean global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading.
我们正面临着危机。你是指全球变暖问题？世界经济问题？不，是阅读衰退的问题。
People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young. Who's responsible? Actually, it's more like, What is responsible?
大家现在都不读书了，尤其是年轻人。谁该负责？其实，问题更应该问成:什么该负责？
The Internet, of course,and everything that comes with it—Facebook, Twitter. You can write your own list. There's been a warning about the imminent death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world. None did. Reading survived; in fact it not only survived, it has flourished. The world is more literate than ever before—there are more and more readers, and more and more books. The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry over.
当然是因特网，还有所有伴随它而生的产物，比如脸谱网站，推特微博。你自己就可以列出个清单。很长时间以来就有读写文明即将消亡的警戒。在20世纪，先是电影，然后是收音机，再然后是电视机，似乎都会给书写领域带来灭顶之灾。但没有一样办到了这点。阅读幸存了下来；事实是它不仅幸存下来，它还兴旺得很。整个世界比以前任何时候都更有文化修养—世界拥有了越来越多的读者，越来越多的书籍。我们如今时常从网上获取阅读材料，对这一事实我们无需过虑。
The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has arguably shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example. Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book. As technology makes new ways of writing possible,new ways of reading are possible. Interconnectivity allows for the possibility of a reading experience that was barely imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations,an e-book can provide readers with an unlimited number of links: to texts, pictures, and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history,and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.
过去20年的电子，数字革命可以认为是为阅读和书写指明了前行的道路。以电子书籍阅读器的推行为例。像Kindle这类设备是的阅读比起在传统纸张上进行的阅读更为方便，也环保得多。正如科技使得新的书写方式成为可能，它也给新的阅读方式提供可能性。互联性使我们有可能拥有在以前几乎是无法想象的阅读体验。传统书籍只能使用照片和插图，而电子书籍可以为读者提供到文本，图片和视频的无数链接。未来人们写作小说，历史和哲学的方式将和以往所见的方式完全不同。
On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization. One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long "digests" of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet will reduce our attention span—that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep concentration.
但另一方面确实存在着琐碎化的危险。在一个微博群它的粉丝提供优秀小说一句话长的摘要。一句话的《战争与和平》？你在开玩笑吧。我们应该警惕阅读的碎片化。存在着这样的危险:互联网的高速链接性会缩短我们的注意力，也就是说我们无法阅读任何一定长度或要求注意力高度集中的东西。
In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be remade each day,we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology but able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.
在如此快速变化的世界中，现实似乎每天都被重新缔造，我们需要有能力集中注意力并理解正在发生的事情。这从来都是文学所具有的功能，我们应该小心，别让这个功能消失。我们的社会要能够设想出现这种人的可能性:他既完全和现代科技合拍，又能理解这个时刻变化，令人迷惑的世界。