In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels: “Moth Smoke,” a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a New York Times best seller that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and, most recently, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.”

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By Anna Holmes

Who or what we choose to read can be as telling as the clothes we wear, and an e-book feels like a detail withheld, a secret kept.

When my second book was released this past October, I told anyone who would listen not to buy the electronic version.

This was not so much a dig at the publishing house production managers who converted my creation into e-book form as it was an acknowledgment of the medium’s many limitations. You see, no matter how fancy the refinements made to, say, Apple’s much heralded Retina display or Amazon’s electronic ink, an e-book offers little promise of discovery or wonder. Browsers may be ubiquitous in our e-portal age, but an e-book doesn’t encourage actual browsing.

This isn’t to say that I don’t read e-books. I do. (Mostly for research — love that search function!) But after close to half a decade of downloading and consuming any number of novels, autobiographies, comics and self-help titles in Kindle form, I have yet to feel as fully invested in the pixels on a Bezos-imagined screen as I do in the indelible glyphs found on good old-fashioned book paper.

Part of this has to do, of course, with the ways in which e-books are bundled with or experienced alongside other forms of entertainment. My iPad, for example, offers an experience not only with the written word, via the iBooks and Kindle apps, but with the moving picture, be it Netflix, Angry Birds or the mesmerizing Google Earth. Deep engagement with an e-book can therefore be quite challenging: It’s difficult to stay present with Colum McCann’s latest offering when the prose is competing for cognitive space with archived episodes of “Scandal.”