LIFE STYLE/SOCIAL TRENDS AND VALUES

Americans are getting used to the idea of renting the good life, from cars to couture to homes. Our shift from a nation of owners to an economy permanently on the move may create efficiencies that will lead to the next boom. The rising popularity of rentership is hardly contained to the housing market. Indeed, it has spurred the creation and growth of innovative businesses in a number of other realms—particularly those that cater to America's cash-strapped, credit-wary youth. Enter the auto-sharing company Zipcar. Or take textbooks: Chegg.com, founded in 2001, has raised more than $200 million in funding and is aiming to displace the college bookstore. An undergrad can buy an economics textbook new for, say, $263. At Chegg.com, she can rent a hard copy of the same book for $94 for 180 days, or an electronic copy for $128 for the same period. As more students come to campus with e-readers, the more efficient consumption of college textbooks is likely to grow rapidly.

Historically, the book, almost alone, has resisted that great colonizing form of our age, the advertisement. But not necessarily for much longer. The coming generations of e-readers are going to alter the traditional reading experience: that sense—when you step inside a book's covers—of having plunged into another universe. You can’t really remain in another universe long with your email pinging in the background. The book, along with the experience of reading it, is bound to morph into something different. Just what our new electronic landscape, and its melding of the ad and the word, may give—and take—from the human experience is Lewis Lapham’s latest subject. His article, Word Order: The Internet as the Toy With a Tin Ear, is embedded in the larger article referred to above.