The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination, I wonder whether we’ll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.

Foer links the material form of reading to memory. If most books present meaning primarily as uniform lines of text, the reader has fewer distinctive visual cues—layout, typography, imagery, spatial landmarks—to help encode and later retrieve what was read. In the wake of the iPad and other screen-based platforms, he imagines a reopening of design possibilities: books could become more visually structured and multimodal, potentially improving comprehension and recall. The quote also gestures toward a broader cultural shift: as “the book” becomes less tied to paper, its conventions are no longer fixed, inviting experimentation with how knowledge is presented and remembered.