It's so easy to romanticize books. The things are, as Stephen King once put it, "a uniquely portable magic." Such is their power that, according to Jane Smiley, “many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book." Thomas Jefferson was cavalier about it when he confessed, in a letter to John Adams, "I cannot live without books."

These are safe admissions: Who, after all, has ever gone wrong extolling the virtues of books? Who has ever met scorn for confessing their love of the literally literary? Books are objects, yes, but they are also objectified metaphors: for structured knowledge, for self-improvement, for the human capacity to dream. We revere them not only because of what they contain, but also because of what they do not: an objective experience. Books, in ways that television and movies and radio can't, derive their power from the subjective workings of a human mind.

I mention all that because of a new project coming out of MIT's Media Lab: the development of books that are not actually, in most traditional ways of book-being, books. The new approach, instead, is wearable and immersive. It relies on extra-lexical components like sound, temperature control, vibration, and ambient lighting to tell its stories. Its creators call it "sensory fiction."