Friend: Do you remember this? When did you read that?

Moskowitz: ''Old Man and the Sea''? Two years ago. . . .

Friend: What did you think?

Moskowitz: . . . I liked it!

The vacuousness of the conclusions, after all the windup, is breathtaking. The fact is Moskowitz has nothing whatever to say about the books he fondles in shot after lingering shot. It's not about the contents of the books. It's about their fetishization.

It is easy to fetishize things that we imagine are on their way out. In the age of Comcast and America Online, books seem quaint, whimsical, imperiled and therefore virtuous. We assume that reading requires a formidable intellect. We forget that books were the television of previous years -- by which I mean they were the source of passive entertainment as well as occasional enlightenment, of social alienation as well as private joy, of idleness as well as inspiration. Books were a mixed bag, and they still are. Books could be used or misused, and they still can be.

Writers themselves carried on about their danger. From Seneca in the first century to Montaigne in the 16th, Samuel Johnson in the 18th and William Hazlitt and Emerson in the 19th, writers have been at pains to remind their readers not to read too much. ''Our minds are swamped by too much study,'' Montaigne wrote, ''just as plants are swamped by too much water or lamps by too much oil.'' By filling yourself up with too much of other folks' thought, you can lose the capacity and incentive to think for yourself. We all know people who have read everything and have nothing to say. We all know people who use a text the way others use Muzak: to stave off the silence of their minds. These people may have a comic book in the bathroom, a newspaper on the breakfast table, a novel over lunch, a magazine in the dentist's office, a biography on the kitchen counter, a political exposé in bed, a paperback on every surface of their home and a weekly in their back pocket lest they ever have an empty moment. Some will be geniuses; others will be simple text grazers: always nibbling, never digesting -- ever consuming, never creating.

''You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch,'' Hazlitt said, ''as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum.'' Such a one is comparable to a person addicted to talk shows or sitcoms or CNN; no worse and no better, no dumber but no smarter either. It is not because something comes between two covers that it is inherently superior to what passes on a screen or arrives on the airwaves.